The Tsunami Charity Auction organized by YNOT Radio and ARS owner Marc De surpassed its goal Monday night, raising more than $250,000 for tsunami aid.
However, since there were several items left and more have been donated in the last 12 hours, the event will return for a second run today beginning at 6 p.m. EST.
“We’re going to kick back off at 6:00 and we’re going until we’re done,” said a somewhat exhausted Daron Babin, a manager for YNOT. “I don’t quite know what that means. When we get to the bottom of the list, as long as no one else throws anything in there, that will be it.”
After a marathon broadcast that began at 3 p.m. EST and lasted nearly 11 hours, the total for the auctioned items sat at $236,401. That’s when Adult.com owner Joe Lensman stepped forward and offered a $20,000 donation for the remaining items. Cybererotica owner Ron Levi followed suit pitching in an additional $10,000, pushing the benefit’s total to more than $260,000 and eclipsing the $250,000 goal.
“The outpouring of support was just tremendous. It started out a couple of weeks ago and it just took off exponentially,” YNOT Radio’s Jay “LAJ” Kopita told AVNOnline.com.
The largest individual winning bid was $30,000 from Storm Media/EMX CEO Shawn “Toolz” Tooley, who said he had no qualms about dropping that amount on 12 months of dedicated hosting from NationalNet.
“We currently host with NationalNet and have more business that we need to move to them anyways so it was as great deal for us, as well as being a primary auction sponsor we wanted to do our part,” Toolz told AVNOnline.com.
There were also winning bids of $25,000 by De on 12 months of banner space on Medium Pimpin BBS and $20,000 by SilverCash CEO Mike Price on three months of banner space on the CyberCat network.
All in all, the turnout and support demonstrated by the Adult community for the cause was tremendous. YNOT producer Oceania said the auction’s chat room was full and phone lines were lit up throughout the broadcast.
“People were calling in and saying ‘we can’t get in to the chat room.’ It was crazy,” she said. “There were a few bidding wars that went on and there were even some callouts.”
Callouts came in the form of challenges from one heavy hitter to another to donate more money, rather than name-calling and bickering, of course.
“Some of these auctions, just as we were closing them on the radio show, would triple or even quadruple in bid amounts,” Kopita said.
While the culmination of events can be deemed a success, YNOT and De built towards it in the preceding weeks, soliciting and compiling donations for the auction and taking bids via the web site before the grand finale.
And the Adult community responded every step of the way.
“The week leading up to the radio show, the amount of items up for auction seemed to be practically doubling every day. The amount of bids – you would keep refreshing the page and see that it jumped $1000 for the grand total in just a matter of a few minutes,” Kopita said.
Proceeds from the benefit will be donated to the American Red Cross.
