The entire idea is in fact to get masses of people to join.
That is normally what advertising campaigns are for. However a one time ad campaign will be the death of any site or business. After all these years McDonalds still advertises and believe it or not people still eat that crap. White Castle, Nissan, Toyota, GM, Burger King, Taco Bell, ebay, Amazon, Overstock, and the list goes on and on all participate in regular advertising and if I'm not mistaken all have been extremely succcesful. Toyota had a mechanical issue ran some ad campaigns came out smelling like a rose. BP had a oil disaster ad campaigns quickly put that fire out.
There have been several Big Box hardware stores in the past who had started their business with huge ad campaigns became succesful and greedy and stopped their advertising only to close their doors a few years later.
Advertising works to gain business that point can't be argued. Whether or not this site can handle an influx of members is something we as members don't know. We don't even know if the owners desire a large auction site, what their intentions are or what their goals are.
With as many times I have seen posts requesting advertising and yet to see any forum comment by the owners it does make me wonder if there is any intention of growing big. If the intentions are in fact to grow and grow rapidly now is the time. With disgruntled sellers on ebay looking for places to go eBid is the best alternative in regards to listing abilities, freindliness, fees but not in regards to sales. You have to think about it, these sellers may have been on ebay for years selling their items no matter how they listed them without promoting themselves at all. They come here list their items then continually close the auction due to the item selling elsewhere. Buyers, of course they will flock to ebay, they are protected like a lion protects their young, they can do no wrong and cannot receive a negative feedback no matter what they do.
So what do we do as sellers knowing this? Sit back and promote eBid and ourselves? Our prices should be lower here due to the low fees but I don't beleive low enough to make someone "jump ship" without a life preserver; buy here when they can buy elsewhere with zero reprocussion possibility. No, we need an ad campaign to get millions aware of eBid all at the same time. The campaign would have to run for a while to allow enough time to "get our shelves stocked" so to speak. It will take some time to get sellers on board and fill our categories so while the ad campaigns are going buyers come and will eventually see a fully stocked auction site right now we are not stocked. Listing more of the same item is helping our listing numbers but not helping new seller sales.
Advertising campaigns target buyers as well as sellers. The problem we have getting the word out individually is to tell 100 or 1000 people about eBid then when they come to visit there isn't enough for them to choose from (we are low in a lot of categories) then they move on to yes you guessed it ebay where you can find everything even a half eaten cheese sandwich.