Buygoogle has been a lonely voice (along with Gartner ) in support of the content marketplace (aka Video Store) that Google released this week. With the hue and cry across the blogoverse about how underwhelming and sucky the Video Store is, you'd never know that this product is really quite revolutionary. While the naysayers are griping about thin content, they're not seeing the market for paid content that Google just invented.
This week Google fired the first shot in disintermediating paid content. Content aggregators like media conglomerates and book publishers make their living by putting themselves between the media consumer and the media producer. They handle marketing, distribution and payment, and keep a giant slice for themselves.
One of the biggest naysayers,
Can you see it? Google could handle all this for electronic books and other premium content using the same plumbing they built for the Video Store and Google Books. This could work well for already-published works.
And it could work just as well to allow niche authors to go direct to their readers. This will unlock much more content that can't deliver the mass-market volume required by major publishers, but is still in demand in its niche.
Millions of people will make their living on the Google Content Marketplace just as they do on eBay today. If Google can sustain their substantial competitive lead, this looks like another billion-dollar business.