Exclusive: A&E Orders New Reality Series Barter Kings

The network that brought you Storage Wars and Shipping Wars is adding to its stable of reality shows about buying and selling stuff: Meet the Barter Kings. A&E has ordered 13 half-hour episodes of the new show, which will air this summer.
Barter Kings follows a group of barterers who will take items and trade them over and over again in order to get the object they really desire. No money changes hands as the entrepreneurs rely on their knowledge of market value to get what they want.
A&E calls the world of Barter Kings a "thriving subculture of cashless trading." Examples include traders starting with an Elvis album and ending with a speedboat, and another starting with a boa constrictor and ending with a gold bullion. Bartering sites have thrived online in recent years in the wake of a weak economy.
TV's Got Male, With More Testosterone Shows to Come
Barter Kings fits inside a subset of cable's thriving "testosterone TV" reality genre, shows about "stuff" — which also include History's Pawn Stars and American Pickers, Discovery's Auction Kings and Sons of Guns, truTV's Hardcore Pawn and Storage Hunters and Spike TV's Auction Hunters.
Documentary company Brownstone Entertainment, which produced the web series Craigslist TV in conjunction with Craigslist, is the producer of Barter Kings.
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