Los Angeles (E! Online) - If a picture is worth 1,000 words, whats the going rate for a dollar bill boasting a picture of Britney Spears where George Washington is supposed to be?
Believe it or not, $3.99.
The embattled pop star is still the hottest thing since sliced bread (featuring the Virgin Mary) on eBay, which has announced that Spears-related items, from copies of signed pictures to gloves she supposedly wore at a New York Jets game to a piece of chewed gum, outsold the flotsam and jetsam related to fellow tabloid princesses Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan.
More than $34,000 worth of Spears stuff was successfully bid on in 2007, although some of the sellers may have been out of luck, considering that estimated sum was generated by only 34,345 items.
Last year, a waiter auctioned off Spears half-eaten egg salad sandwich and her then-hubby Kevin Federlines chomped-on corndog. And online casino goldenpalace.com ate it up, so to speak, to the tune of $520.
However, this was the year of the shave, and locks of Spears hair, along with the partially imbibed can of Red Bull she was carrying when she walked into the salon, were up for sale just days after the OopsI Did it Again singer went bald. Although its unclear if the sale went through, at one point 26 people had pushed up the price of one lot of those once-idolized strands to more than $1,000.
What Americans buy and sell every day is one of the best indications of what theyre obsessed with, said eBay pop culture expert/harbinger of doom Karen Bard. When someone or something is being written about in tabloids or reported about on CNN, if it revs up the American public, youre bound to discover a bidding frenzy for related listings on eBay.
Well, a certain briefly jailed heiress was all over CNN this year. More than 27,000 Hilton-related items, including a toothbrush purportedly stolen from her trash, were sold via eBay.
The most popular items sold in connection with Hilton and Spears, though, were bottles of their signature fragrances, according to the online auctioneer.
Meanwhile, Lohan was in third place with 8,099 items sold.
Thanks to her run-in with the razor, her increasingly high-stakes custody battle and her first studio album in three years, Spears name was also Yahoos most popular search term for the sixth time in seven years. The oft scandal-tinged World Wrestling Entertainment came in second and Hilton placed third.
As far as eBays ever-popular sports-memorabilia category goes, disgraced athletes did big business in 2007.
Possibly juiced homerun king Barry Bonds outsold both imprisoned Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick and O.J. Simpson, who pushed just 5,196 items compared with Bonds 145,497.
Bonds, of course, has been indicted on federal charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in relation to allegations that he took steroids, while Simpson is awaiting trial on armed robbery and kidnapping charges for allegedly shaking down two memorabilia collectors in Las Vegas. Vick is scheduled to be sentenced Monday for conspiracy after pleading guilty to bankrolling a dogfighting ring.
In other pop culture craziness, Transformers paraphernalia outsold Harry Potter doodads when it came to film memorabilia and Greys Anatomy beat out Heroes in terms of small-screen swag.
The sci-fi (and hot chick)-lovin, comic book-collectin fans of Bionic Woman came through, however, giving merchandise related to the troubled NBC show a leg up on goodies from fellow freshman drama Pushing Daisies, a whopping 4,249 to 337 items sold.
Troubled, because all eight completed episodes of Bionic Woman have aired and NBC has yet to give the go ahead for more when--or if--the current writers strike ends.
