Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post over on BuzzMachine describing Edgeio's new premium content widget. In his post, he explains that this could be used by smaller time content producers to create premium versions of their stuff. For example, a blogger could report the facts of a story for free, but charge $1 for the analysis.
The paid-content widget
What Edgeio has created is a slick little widget that lets you see and then buy content without leaving a site. So let’s say you’re on GigaOm or PaidContent and they want to sell you a special report or exclusive video they’ve done. You click and buy and view the content right there within the same page. Until they’re clever enough to go free — or until someone makes them — I could see the Wall Street Journal enabling people to embed their stories on their blogs or sites with this pay structure in place: ‘Want to see the story right now, here? You can.’ The widget also has a link that lets you grab it and put it on your site, selling the content and taking a cut. Right now, this is enabled with credit card or PayPal.
This made me wonder: What if this was applied to real estate? Agents seem reluctant to shoot lots of photos of homes, which seems strange since people are clearly interested in seeing every room of a home they're considering buying. What if agents conducted truly thorough shoot-outs of homes, but only provided 1-2 photos for free and charged a buck or two to view the rest? Would they make enough revenue to justify the additional time it took to shoot and upload the photos?
Or, would they get heat from their seller who wonders why they're leveraging the listing for side-revenue?
More realistically, I could see this happening with condo and neighborhood developments where local real estate review sites from outside the real estate industry would shoot high quality development videos and charge viewers access to the content. They would profit from delivering content agents hold back from consumers in an attempt to force consumers to contact them.
Personally, I've been in the market for a condo and can't find good information on local developments without talking to salespeople. I guess that makes me the perfect candidate for this type of content.
