Edgeio launches marketplace widget for web publishers

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.

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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.