Zipidee Wants To Be THE Marketplace For Digital Goods
Nick Gonzalez
19 comments »
In 1995 eBay sold a laser pointer online and kicked off the online marketplace for selling physical goods. As networks improved in the intervening years, the idea of what can be bought and sold online has grown to include digital goods, such as music, e-books, and videos as well. Zipidee wants to be a market for those digital goods, and is expected to launch some time in the next week.
It’s by no means a new concept, there are several sites out there that trade in digital bits: Payloadz, Tradebits, e-Junkie, Lulu, Edgeio, and more. eBay already sells digital goods, with delivery often handled through these third party sites. iTunes can also sell your content, but requires an approved label if you want to get paid.
However, Zipidee will offer considerably more control over pricing and distribution than these other sites. Merchants on Zipidee will be able to create their own virtual store where they can list their digital wares for sale on the site directly or across Zipidee’s website widgets. It’s an ideal setup for anyone selling an instructional video series or their own audiobook.
Audio and video can be uploaded to the site to be rented or bought at whatever price the creator wishes and consumed via downloads or streams. Other services often only allow downloads.
You will be able to track the sale of their good in real time and adjust the price accordingly using their analytics dashboard. Creators will also have the option of protecting their product with Zipidee’s own DRM system. DRMed goods come with a license to play the media through their web or downloadable player on any computer with your Zipidee credentials.
Zipidee will make money through a $1 listing fee (waived to start) and roughly 80/20 split of the purchase price, like Lulu (Zipidee takes a smaller cut for higher priced goods).
To start, Zipidee will focus on digitizing the kind of media now sold at conferences and trade shows as DVDs or Books. For launch, they’re digitizing materials from a series of consultants and speakers such as DreamUniversity and MightyVentures who currently sell millions of dollars in physical merchandise directly to their customers.
Yet, there’s still a big question over whether and where people will buy “long-tail” digital content. Zipidee is fighting the trend toward free digital content (wikipedia, 5 min) and people are reluctant enough to even pay for big-media’s content (most songs on iPods do not come from iTunes). There is also a question as to whether the best way to sell this content is horizontally in a single marketplace, or vertically by topic. There are a great number of digital content verticals out there already that could serve as points of sale for independently produced content (DocStoc, Scribd, Amie Street, 5 Min, Snocap). We’ll have to see how it all pans out when Zipidee launches.
yes thats something interesting, theres news about Y max coming to the UK soon before olympics with next gen internet speed
Will ebay remain quiet to this new front. I doubt zipidee will be a gladiatior.
this is one awesome site and I bet it will become the gladiator
The kicker with ALL these new companies are there names. It is unfortunate ( at least for them) that the domainers have purchased ALL the good url .com names. The biggest expense for companies such as Zipidee will become their marketing budgets, unless of course they go to church and pray for some viral marketing to take off.
…I do like the concept though.
It is indeed an interesting concept to go after the long-tail digital content space, knowing that others (iTunes and friends) already own the mainstream content.
Believe the copyright issues will be tough to handle though… will see.
Alex,
I agree that all the GOOD domains are taken, but that does not mean you have to pay alot for a good name! I have let a lot of great domains being used for FREE! We still have many great domains available including rare 2 and 3 letter domains (xg.org, 0pc.com, 4ny.com, 4dc.com, etc)
All domains are FREE to use - we are NOT for profit! I donated Drupal.Com, Ecmascript.Org, OpenAjax.Org, and some of the largest web site in the world!
Go to OpenDomain.Org to find out more!
I like it, and agree with the name thing…damn domain sitters
Meh. Looks neat enough. Nothing novel in any way though. Each of the competitors either has a comparable “widget” or could easily create one. The domain thing is pretty tough. We had to settle for the “z” as Lockheed Martin has the “s” domain. Not selling it cheap I can say that for sure! 20% is a little steep.
Raising funds before they launch is also a stacking the cards against them imho. I think launching and getting organic growth would be the way to go, else we’ll see the burn again. There has been many before them that have come and gone that could have survived if they hadn’t set their funding on fire.
eBay is pretty slow on the digital goods uptake, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t looked into it. They can’t do too much in house these days because of a backlog of dev tasks from what I see. They’d have to buy rather than build and there is not one player big enough to entice them yet. Watch out for Amazon though. They are coming in a big way in digital goods. I can’t believe it has taken them this long to focus more attention. They’ve had downloads for a while, but haven’t pushed them.
As for the marketplace, yeah, that’s ok. We offer one to our sellers. We find it helps the small guys who don’t know about marketing the most. Most people want to sell directly from their site and that is the most effective means from what we see. A well thought out centralized store may be the thing though. Lord knows we need to improve there ourselves. I wish them luck.
It’s getting crowded in here.
Sounds like eBay and others have a new competitor in market
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
Interesting idea, though I don’t really like ebooks, online videos, or audiobooks.
It seems to be against the spirit of Web2.0 - the free flow of information.
Youtube - is successfull, Zipidee looks like anti-Youtube or 5min or any Web2.0, it has that “premium-service” flavour, when you pay for content.
I think that it’s a cool idea, but it seems that they are going for making as much money as they can from this site, which in turn will go against the free flow spirit (as already commented by Dimitry). For the end of the long tail, this site would not be that attractive since most of these producers are not necessarily going for making huge bucks. Reaching large crowds and making creations available for the masses is the goal of many, and therefore zipidees charging fees would be an obstacle.
i personally would like to see a marketplace like this open up for consumers and producers
From their website: “Zipidee’s proprietary and patented Digital Rights Management platform protects sellers from copyright infringement. Zipidee is ideal for original content producers, independent film makers, musicians, educators, game publishers, software developers, corporate trainers or anyone who wants to profit from selling digital goods online.”
Just what the market is demanding - proprietary DRM. That worked really well for Google Video! Perhaps they could license this to iTunes, as well!
Sarcasm aside - digital marketplaces are a fantastic idea. I just don’t think Zipidee is taking the right approach here.
Disclosure: I am the founder of year old digital marketplace that has from the beginning been firmly in the camp of open formats and flexible licensing.
Our platform gives sellers the option to “opt in” or “opt out” of DRM mode when they sell their digi-goods. While the trend in entertainment appears like it’s going toward no-DRM, but educational/informational space is still requiring DRM. The Zipidee platform is flexible enough to handle both verticals.
Marketplaces are cool. They help merchants start earning without investing into marketing or even in a website.. but why restrict marketplaces to “digital” only?