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"Blish is a digital content marketplace.  Like so many sites these days, it seems to be positioning itself as the \"eBay of digital content\", selling everything from ringtones to how-to videos.  From the site:\nBlish is a new online marketplace designed to enable consumers to quickly find and immediately purchase a wide variety of products as expansive as digital content itself. As Blish grows you will have increasing access to full ebooks, stock photography, technical manuals and analysis, legal forms, software, video games, 3D modeling, motivational seminars, academic lectures, sound loops, and music tracks; as well as ring tones, screen savers, mobile games and even video clips.\nI'm interested in Blish because it's an idea I considered myself a while back.  Stock photography sites like iStockPhoto (and more recently Fotolia) have been extremely successful when it comes to buying and selling photos.  And even big hitters like Google are asking: how can we help people buy and sell videos?  What's more, the business model seems like a good one - just stand in the middle of the transaction and take a cut.  So why do I remain unconvinced?\nHere's the problem: Blish claims it will offer music, stock photos, mobile games, software and more.  But these are all totally different markets - you can't simple bundle them together under the moniker of \"digital content\".  To clarify, here's a quick breakdown of the digital content space:\n1.  Digital to Physical.  These marketplaces take the digital bits and convert them to atoms - think Cafepress, Zazzle and Lulu (a print-on-demand bookstore).  You might buy a framed photograph, a t-shirt, a book, a calendar, a mug or a set of stamps.  Often buyers are motivated by the desire to own something unique and unusual.\n2.  Entertainment store.  This is the iTunes model - selling music and videos for a price so low that many people will use your store instead of P2P networks.  People are paying for the convenience of getting good quality digital media wherever and whenever they want it.  (Incidentally, the word \"marketplace\" suggests a place where anyone can buy or sell, but iTunes is still lacking when it comes to user-generated content).\n3.  Licensing/Stock Photography.  There are plenty of sites that license digital content to be used on your website - iStockPhoto and Fotolia are good examples.  People creating websites use these services to steer clear of copyright issues - what's $1 for a photo if it keeps you out of trouble?  \n4.  Everything else.  eBooks, web templates, software and the rest.  All these content types need specialized marketplaces of their own.\nIn a very circular way, I'm trying to say that digital marketplaces like Cafepress, iTunes and iStockPhoto all have their place, but these media types are so different that it seems foolish to treat \"digital content\" as a single entity.  The \"eBay of digital content\" would be like a half-assed stock photo site crossed with a bad iTunes clone and a CafePress wannabe.  To put it bluntly: Blish is a really, really bad idea."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2006/01/12/blish-why-the-ebay-of-digital-content-is-a-really-bad-idea/>