From the post: We posted the auction on Reddit and, with the help of a few friends, got to the front page. ... Pretty quickly the story was picked up by Techcru

From the post: We posted the auction on Reddit and, with the help of a few friends, got to the front page. ... Pretty quickly the story was picked up by Techcrunch ... This part has got to be important. Getting significant visibility for the auction likely helped quite a bit, and eBay is just a medium that made the auction possible.