NEW YORK, NY.- The month of May came in like a lion and stayed that way for LiveAuctioneers.com, with online purchases of art, antiques and quality collectibles at their auction house partners’ sales totaling a record-setting $7.9 million.

“This is a record for any month since our post-eBay era began on January 1st of 2009,” said LiveAuctioneers CEO Julian R. Ellison. “The last time we saw numbers like that was in November of 2008, when we were still in a marketing partnership with eBay. During that particular month, Internet purchases made through LiveAuctioneers totaled $7.7 million.” EBay discontinued its Live Auctions division on Dec. 31, 2008.

During the month of May, 296 auctions were listed on LiveAuctioneers.com, with nearly 6 million page hits recorded across all catalogs. There were 76, 233 sign-ups, and 18,442 unique users registered to bid. “What this shows us is that there are many thousands of ‘regulars’ who come to LiveAuctioneers to bid in multiple auctions,” said Ellison. “Art collectors, for instance, might use our search function to find artworks by particular artists that are offered at any number of auction houses. These are good, solid buyers who return again and again.”

The top lot of May 2010 for LiveAuctioneers was a Takashi Murakami artwork acquired by an Internet bidder for $602,500 in Phillips de Pury’s May 13 sale of the Halsey Minor collection. Titled PO + KU Surrealism Mr. DOB –Yello, the five-part, acrylic-on-canvas mounted to board painting was artist-signed and dated "Takashi '98" on verso. A highly identifiable work, it had been exhibited worldwide and came to auction with the bonus of extensive provenance.

Ellison said he believes June’s statistics quite possibly could surpass those of May, especially in light of the $1.1 million in Internet sales recorded during Profiles in History’s June 10-12 Hollywood Auction #40. More than 900 individuals registered to bid via the Internet through LiveAuctioneers over the three-day auction period, and in all, 520 lots – an average of 40.8% of Profiles in History’s inventory – were sold each day through LiveAuctioneers.

All-important underbidders set the stage for success at the Profiles in History auction, with underbids placed through LiveAuctioneers totaling $194,675. During the opening session, 57.43% of the underbids came through LiveAuctioneers, while on day two, the corresponding figure was 48.48%. During the third and final session, participants bidding online through LiveAuctioneers were responsible for a remarkable 90.75% of the sale’s underbids.

“To see this level of performance, especially in the midst of such difficult economic times, is enormously gratifying and surely an indicator that bidding in auctions via the Internet has become a widely accepted part of the mainstream,” said Ellison.