Actually edgeo is not an intermediary in the traditional sense. We use paypal to proces payment and the content is delivered from its creator to the buyer directly.

The only reason there is a nedd for an edgeio account is so that content purchased can be consumed again later. For this to be possibe we need to know what was paid for and by whom. This is less an issue with downloaded content but is a big issue with streamed or viewed “in-place” content.

We could achieve the same goal if every publisher adopted an API but to keep it simple for all we use an edgeio account as an ID.

Keith Teare
CEO
edgeio

For small start-ups like AliveinBaghdad.org and AliveinMexico.org, ad revenue may not be a reliable source of income, for many reasons.

We haven’t yet put a pay-for-play gate on AiB or M yet, but we did discover that Paypal allows people to engage in voluntary subscriptions. I’d love to hear more about how small content creators like us, producing serious newsworthy content of international value, might hope to survive on advertising alone.

Particularly with video, viewers are still highly suspect of ads and seem to view content with ads in a very negative light. We need to find a sustainable model of success, but we also need to keep our audience, because that’s the reason we’re doing this.

With every content transaction, Edgeio gains users and gains accounts, and its position as intermediary strengthens. Do the content creators establish any relationship with the purchaser, or learn anything about them, or even get their e-mail address? I don’t see that they do. Only Edgeio does.

The internet is all about putting the means of production and distribution directly in the hands of creators. It’s about enabling audiences to interact with each other and with the content authors, building communities. This is a model that works in opposition to that ethos by setting up a third party as the intermediary.

Kind regards (again),
Evan Rudowski

Why not just go direct to PayPal using all of their options and save the 20% that Evan notes above?

In my previous life we played a lot with the points for items method and it never really took off. Even in the mothers demo which worked best for this type of deal.

There are already tools for running membership websites (we offer one) and there are hundreds of such sites.

Subscription and membership work when the content is unique, actionable, not easily substituted, and from a trusted source (individual or brand). Usually this is niche content that can be recognized by members of the niche as having measurable value.

Examples of successful paid content websites include http://www.jancisrobinson.com (which runs on our platform); http://www.restaurantowner.com (on a rival platform) and http://www.preachingtoday.com (also not ours). Yes, on preachingtoday.com you can download a quick sermon if you’re a reverend in a rush. That’s valuable and actionable.

For mass media brands such as the WSJ and NYT, it may make more economic sense to drop the subscription firewall in favor of potentially more lucrative advertising revenue streams. This doesn’t mean that the subscription model is a failure, as some seem to want to argue.

This is different, of course, from the principle of whether or not content deserves to be free. I happen to think that content creators deserve to be paid for their knowledge, expertise and effort. Not all of them will reach the scale necessary to achieve this via advertising.

It is good to see Edgeio catching on to the paid content concept but they take a big cut — from my quick test, their cut of a $20 content purchase was $4, or 20 percent. Ouch.

Kind regards,
Evan Rudowski

Examples

htttp://www.yourlist.com