The Challenge of Selling Content on the Web – Edgeio, Part Two

It’s tough to compete with free. 

A few days ago, I posted a lengthy review of Edgeio’s new widget-powered, paid content platform.  As an experiment, I made half of the review available for free, and hid the second half behind Edgeio’s paid content widget – readers wishing to see the whole thing would have to shell out (said in my best Dr. Evil voice) ONE AMERICAN DOLLAR.

Well two days later, I’m no closer to retirement. 

On a blog with about 700 subscribers and a bunch more random drop-ins, I sold exactly zero subscriptions.  Nobody was willing to shell out a buck to read the rest of the review.  Not even my mom.

I certainly don’t “blame” Edgeio for this.  It’s an interesting topic, and the platform works – I tested it myself.

So there are a couple of things that could be going on. 

Sexy Widget ain’t the Wall Street Journal.  I will grudgingly – and only with the cold, hard sales stats staring me in the face - admit this.  Also, a brand spanking new distributed commerce application that requires you to submit your credit card info is a little scary.  We’ve all had products in beta before, and the stakes are certainly raised when there’s credit card info involved. 

But more importantly, beyond the hassle of pulling out your credit card, folks are used to getting this sort of content for free.  I know I am.  There are at least three, in depth, thoughtful reviews of the new Edgeio platform that I knew of – all available for free.

Despite the failed Sexy Widget experiment, I do think there will always be a place for paid content.  For example, my friend Aaron Wall has been very successful with SEO Book – a constantly updated guide to Search Engine Optimization (it's excellent, btw).  I’m just not sure that a 500 word blog review will ever be enough to get people to ante up.

While the signs would seem to indicate that the market for paid editorial content is shrinking, it’s possible that this reduction could be offset by the growth in UGC as a whole. 

Without further ado, here’s the complete review of Edgeio’s Distributed Paid Content Platform:

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.

The concept of distributed commerce is something that I’ve been interested in for a while – I even bought the domain www.distributedcommerce.com a while back with a friend, and am actively kicking around a few ideas.

To date, there has been some mild progress in this space.  Shopcasting – publishing your purchasing or wish lists to your friends – is neat, but seems to be a little early to be ripe for mass adoption.  There are also a few distributed shopping carts popping up out there.

But I haven’t seen anything as compelling as Edgeio’s new “distributed paid content platform.” 

Not only does the Edgeio widget promote your content in a distributed fashion, it actually processes the sale at the host site.  When they say “distributed,” they really mean it.

Says Keith Teare:

“We are making it possible for valuable content to be made available for sale on any web site. The web site does not need an ecommerce system, or a billing system – Edgeio takes care of both. We have two customers for whom we work to make this possible. First a content creator who has content that they would like to sell and have distributed. The content creator comes to Edgeio and tells us about their content and we give them the means of publishing it. Second a publisher, whose main goal is to add revenue to their web site. The publisher comes to Edgeio and can choose to become a point of sale for any paid content that they wish to be associated with. Any web site in the world can now become a point of sale for the things they are passionate about.”

The platform accepts any sort of content – music, video, text – and really is a pleasure to use.  I didn’t have a single stumble when setting up this service for the first time, which is unusual.  (On the payment side, however, I couldn’t figure out how to turn on PayPal as an acceptable payment method.)

So what problems are Edgeio solving for the publisher?  They’re providing an alternative revenue model for content publishers.  They’re solving distribution, by creating a viral, widget powered, financially incentivized affiliate program specific to your content.  They’re solving payment processing.  And they’re solving analytics with a slick back end that tracks your content sales. 

Furthermore, their target market is those with a selfish interest in using their service.  In the world of blogging, a natural progression seems to be 1) Start a blog because you like to write / see professional value; 2) Build an audience; 3) Figure out how to make a little money.   Edgeio’s product sits squarely in this third stage.

Most of the other social shopping services seem to be targeting everybody – letting folks publish their shopping tastes and histories, for no apparent reason other than self expression.  I see it as a classic “need to have” vs. “nice to have.”

Edgeio is ambitious, it’s well designed, and its simplicity masks a robust, turnkey solution for content creators. 

Now I understand why folks have dropped $6.5M into Keith Teare and team. 

For more, see Nick Carr, TechCrunch, and Business Week.

Comments

[David Armstrong]

Good post...we compete with Edgeio...and find most people that have tried Edgeio switch to us. We don't do any PR...just every day customer satisfaction. We are not a techcrunch business...they aren't really our customer. I'd be curious to your thoughts. Thanks..David

[Alex]

David, how does your service work? Sounds interesting. Alex