[swarmee]

Nat Turner, the new part-owner of Collector's Universe, would be a better bogeyman for the tin foil hat crowd. Obviously with PSA's liability in their Grade Guarantee and Turner's ability to buy companies at whim, it would at least be a more plausible conspiracy theory.

The same type of data is available for free through Brent's PWCC Marketplace with a free login for sports cards, maybe not every single listing that Worthpoint had, but a lion's share of it I'd guess.

It certainly seems bizarre that Worthpoint would go, "Man, we're getting a lot of people consistently searching for historical baseball cards and items! We should really clear them out!"

Another possibility is that eBay itself restricted the data feed, or tried to strong arm Worthpoint to remove it so eBay could charge more for its historical data. We know they're restricting sites like watchcount and 130point to run as many queries as they usually do.

Kind of reminds me of the VCP image quality "improvements" a couple of years ago where making lower fidelity images available was considered "optimization." Hopefully Worthpoint reverses their decision, because if PSA and PWCC are the only arbiters of historical images and pricing data, then the fox is guarding the henhouse again.