Edgeio, a company that provides online classified services, is introducing an e-commerce widget for web publishers, to help them create marketplaces on their own sites.
The Palo Alto-based company now lets a web site owner put up their own digital information for sale and allows other sites to resell the information for a cut.
Amazon and other companies already offer affiliate programs, whereby web publishers can earn a percentage fee from directing users to Amazon’s site in order to make online purchases. Edgeio’s offering is interesting, however, because it lets sites make sales without trying to drive users back to its own site (info here).
For now, the company is focusing on digital information, such as video, audio, downloadable files, etc. but it hopes to go after other e-commerce in the future. We first heard about this vision last fall from chief executive Keith Teare, when the company had completed a $5 million round.
A research company, for example, could use this new service to provide an excerpt from a report it has behind a paywall — you can then click and purchase the full report, using your payment information stored with Edgeio. Further, if you’re a web site publisher you can also resell this report on your own site as an affiliate partner of the research company — you just link to the report and include Edgeio’s one-click purchasing method, then earn an affiliate fee based on how many of your users complete the purchase.
Partner Earningscast is using Edgeio to sell an audio recording it has of the Vonage quarterly earning call yesterday.
Edgeio already tries to facilitate online ads (previous coverage): You can post an ad on your blog, tag the ad with the word “listing” — then Edgeio will search the web to find it, and add it to its database. If you add more tags, such as “Mountain View” and “chair,” Edgeio will use those tags to better categorize the listing.
This new effort is launching today at Gnomedex, in conjunction with the other current Edgeio partner, Lockergnome.
2 Comments
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TechDumpster (living in First Life) said:
It’s great to see TechCrunch blatantly violate any sort of disclosure by writing about Edgio when Michael Arrington is affiliated:
http://techdumpster.com/2007/08/09/michael-arrington-shill-of-the-week/
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Dale said:
I’m trying to find info about Edgeio. Are they still in business? Does it work with http://www.moguling.com ?
4 Trackbacks
12:39 pm
Edgeio launches the Internet’s first distributed paid content platform. | edgeio blog said:
[...] - here ReadWrite web - here TechCrunch - here Venturebeat - here Gnomedex - here Jeff Jarvis - here Dan Farber - ZDNet - here Bub.blicio.us - here Mashable - here [...]
1:15 pm
edgeio has announced the paid content platform. Distributed Commerce meets Web 2.0 | ...a brief history of my time said:
[...] - here Techmeme - here and here ReadWrite web - here TechCrunch - here Venturebeat - here Gnomedex - here Jeff Jarvis - here Dan Farber - ZDNet - here Bub.blicio.us - here Mashable - here [...]
11:15 pm
VentureBeat » PlugandPlay winners: BlueGem, Gigya, Twiki and Zipidee said:
[...] Sellers can also use the company’s widget to sell their works from their own web sites, which is similar to online classified company Edgeio’s digital marketplace widget, launched last month. [...]
2:38 pm
VentureBeat » Edgeio, after trying bold new ad model, to auction assets. said:
[...] However, as Teare explained in a phone call over the weekend, the business needed two sides to work: advertisers and publishers. While Edgeio was able to sign up advertisers in droves — Edgeio boasted 20 million ad units — it wasn’t able to sign up enough publishers to distribute them, he said. Edgeio had purposefully planned to build up its ad base first, and then sought to meet targets for its publisher network second. That second part didn’t come along quickly enough, and when it missed its milestones, investors struggled to justify putting more money into the company. It signed up 2,000 publishers to run ads on their sites, but of those 1,800 were running free classified ad sites, and so revenue wasn’t as robust as Edgeio’s investors hoped (see our coverage of its publisher efforts here). [...]