EVERY nine minutes somebody buys a scanty outfit for a Britney Spears doll or some other item of pop trivia, and Jenny, a deeply Christian housewife from the American rural heartland, is very happy. She is also a little richer.

Her husband does not know the half of it. Three years ago he sneered when his middle-aged wife turned on their bedroom computer to sell Barbie dolls and musical memorabilia over the internet.

Today, many thousands of pink watches and Britney doll bikinis later, Jenny is enjoying the last laugh as she looks forward to her divorce. “My primary fear right now is my ex discovering how much my business is worth before the marriage is legally over,” she says.

“That, and my church finding out I specialise in Britney, but I am dumping her and moving on to other collectables. Maybe ceramic hobbits.”

An estimated 150,000 people across the world make a living on eBay, the internet auction site, by selling everything from old postcards to shopping centres. The true elite are 500 “top power sellers” who will be invited to join a millionaires’ circle this Easter.

San José-based eBay, like Amazon, the bookseller, and Google, the internet search engine, is a survivor of the dotcom bubble that burst four years ago. Pierre Omidyar, who founded it in 1995 as an online jumble sale for Silicon Valley geeks, has amassed a fortune estimated at £4.2 billion.

The website has become a part of popular culture. “Pop songs mention it, and it has become a verb — to ebay. This is a hallmark of true influence,” says Dennis Price, author of several guide books to making a fortune on the site.

According to Price, Jenny is typical of the most successful eBay traders: often college- educated, in their thirties and forties and seeking a second career, they start off selling the contents of their cupboards until eBay fever grips and they move on to their neighbour’s garage.

Like Jenny, Jim, prefers to use a “trader tag” to protect his identity because he is a teacher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology near Boston.

“Today I am selling about 1,000 textbooks through eBay and Amazon because I have the inside track of what is going to be popular next term,” jokes the fortysomething science teacher. “I do not think the college would be happy with such insider trading.”

Not all eBay millionaires are so shy. Craig Solomon , 40, was nearly broke after the end of his first marriage when he sold a Led Zeppelin album for a few dollars on eBay in July 1998. Now the Oregon-based entrepreneur is setting up warehouses across the American west to hold goods to sell on behalf of more cautious clients.

For sociologists, eBay has also become a barometer of public taste. Marc Smith, employed by Microsoft to analyse such trends, says the virtual market knows before any media pundit when a pop idol ceases to be fashionable or a once-neglected brand such as Hush Puppy shoes becomes cool again.

“This community is at the cutting edge of contemporary pop culture,” says Smith. “With nearly 70m registered bidders around the world, more people watch eBay than any one TV programme. And often it’s a lot more entertaining, too.”

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