Been reading many us are feedup with the huge ebay fees they are charging. I was too, so thouht I was share my info on how I continue to sell many items and pay no listing fees. After some research a few months ago I found:

TheStreet – This is totaly free to signup, use, list and sell your items and has over 4 million views a day. I’ve found it extremelty usful for UK sales.

CQOUT- Simply put this is Ebay only worldwide competitior, they do charge a $1 signup fee to prove your identity. However all listings are totaly free upto $200 and multimillion views daily from all over the world. This I found is especially good for the US market.

I hope this help some of you improve your sales on this bad time of world econimic markets, so it can only help to get free advertising and sell your items. If anyone knows anymore, please post here so I too can benifit.

In the same way, for a piece of data or content that I own, I can choose which “trustee” I place my data with and can “withdraw” (ie to another service provider) my data according to the terms of my service agreement. Meanwhile, that trustee is free to try and make profits from my content by driving advertising, social mapping or other revenue from it.

Sounds fair enough to me.

Couple of afterthoughts, however:
- Banking is regulated: the internet will potentially need a regulator to achieve the “liquidity” of content outlined above.
- If these content ownership rules become embedded in internet culture over the next few years, and Facebook, YouTube and all the rest are just trusted, temporary custodians of their customer’s content: what implications does that have for internet company valuations?

http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2008/02/power-to-the-persons-redux/
http://www.mediainfluencer.net/2008/02/social-cloud-and-the-blue-pill/

Btw, I am a keen supporter of dataportability.org… taking the toys (data) away from web apps and platform owners should bring some interesting developments. :)

I sincerely hope that pay-for-meter becomes more popular in the future. The penny-gap is largely a cultural phenomenon where people think the internet should be both free as in speech and free as in beer, combined with the lack of a really simple and ubiquitous micro-payment provider.

But until then, a majority of startups will depend on the very very unoriginal “lets get popular and stick ads in there!” business model, upon which raw data accessibility is not easily monetizeable. I don’t think Amazon S3 is a good analogy: it’s customer base are the content/application providers, who are business and don’t really exhibit a penny gap like consumers do.