Let The Bidding Begin…

So, Odeo founder Ev Williams has put his website up for sale. Anyone care? We do. Odeo may not have been the most popular kid in school, and even got picked on by that bully in Cupertino (Apple). But it has served many a podcast and podcaster well. Though its visitorship pales in comparison to iTunes, it’s still seeing over 600k hello messages from IPs around the world every month, and doling out 3 million pages/audio files to fans with faithful ears. If you’ve never gotten into the whole proprietary net app thing that Apple has built for itself so successfully over the past few years, you’re probably familiar with Odeo and its provisions.

But kind words won’t bring it back to the heights it saw back when podcast directories were popping up like crazy. It rode the wave better than most. That’s why Ev wants to let her go while she still has some umph in her.

The site is breaking even at the moment, generating enough revenue to pay the bandwidth bill but hardly anything to boast about. Sure, breaking even is something some web pages only wish they could be doing, but when more and more people are starting to get comfortable with having their ripped music libraries, paid downloads, and freebies (podcasts) all in one place, it’s hard to do exceptionally well when you’re only online. Hey, if someone snatches Odeo out of Williams’ hands and manages to keep it afloat until our mobile web devices give us the freedom to explore content and innovative apps that our PC-based browsers decode for us, Odeo will be ripe for “miniaturization”.

After he was setting up a ‘For Sale’ sign for Odeo, Williams touched on the fact that a vacancy in the online business world still existed, one that would specialize in providing the tools and a semi-streamlined process for selling small and semi-small web-based entities. Something like an eBay for online businesses, sustainable and non. Sure, there’s BizBuySell, but something even easier to operate. Heck, the more we think about it, an auction house of that sort would be golden. Build it, Ev. Impress us once more.

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