Selling Content with Edgeio's Distributed Platform

I’m not going to lie to you.

When Edgeio announced back in November of last year that they had secured a $5M Series A round of funding, small and petty thoughts crossed my mind.

At the time, it appeared to me that Edgeio had demonstrated zero traction with their original $1.5M in angel funding.  Worse, they still seemed to be pitching a super geeky business plan that required millions of bloggers of varying technical prowess to learn the new behavior of tagging their posts to show up Edgeio’s classifieds database.  At the time, Blogger didn’t even offer an intuitive way to tag posts.

I didn’t get it, I didn’t understand how it could possibly grow beyond the world of TechCrunch readers, and I didn’t think it was fair that this company had a $6.5M in funding to play with while many folks that I knew bootstrapped away on projects with what I saw as far more mass appeal.

Well, a funny thing happened.  A few months back I met Keith Teare at a Stirr event, where he demo’d Edgeio’s new distributed classified platform that allowed any site to easily add classifieds.  Now this was cool, I thought.  I think I poked around a little more, meant to write it up for Sexy Widget, but never got to it.

Now here we are in August, and Edgeio is up to more clever stuff.   They recently announced a widget / distributed app that makes it extraordinarily simple for content creators sell their content via blogs or other widget friendly places.  Furthermore, there’s a built in affiliate program that encourages others to help distribute your content.  In theory, content that is sell-able will attract an army of distributors, all looking to earn some affiliate dollars.

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Comments

[lawrence]

Here's a comment for the Edgeio gang - I noticed that the Edgeio widget doesn't come through feeds. So someone reading a feed doesn't necessarily know that there is more to the article that can be purchased. I added text in the body of the post that says "click through to read more" to get around this issue, but I'm sure there's a more elegant fix to be had on your side.