I finally got to 1000 gold on classic! So let’s review the challenge and see how it went.
Time spent
My character has 2 days and 14 hours played. This is quite substantial, and means I’ve spent about 58 hours logged in. That would put my gold per hour at a measly 17 (I had about 4 hours played before starting this challenge), which is not very good. That does include the early days of very time inefficient gold doing wand shuffles and similar, so we can expect that the top level gold per hour was a lot higher. It also includes the last portion where I stopped buying just to finish the challenge with sales.
Is it still good?
The reason why I like this market so much is because it is very easy to get into and anyone can do it. This makes it a perfect gateway to goldmaking. Even if the total gold per hour for me was fairly low, it can be much higher if you only focus on a smaller subset of high value items. I spent a lot of time flipping low value items, which takes up time. If you are as sweaty on the goldmaking side as I am and you have more than one account then the real gold per hour goes up significantly. You only need to focus on it when actually purchasing or posting and running to the mailbox. If you can go afk and do something else when the scan runs, then the real gold per hour is a lot higher.
The best items
Eventually Dream Dust managed to dethrone Dark runes! It took a while though, but it was a very consistent play for the last part of the challenge. Essences also managed to bring in some real gold alongside Larval Acid. We can see that profit percentages across the board are mostly between 15 and 50 %. For some items it is higher which contributed quite a bit to the overall profits.
Quantities
We can see that I ended up selling thousands of items to get to a 1000 gold. The total time required to sell so many items is quite high, so you would want to focus on a lot fewer items if you want to make efficient gold per hour doing this.