OwnZones Media Network this morning announced that they’ve landed an initial round of funding to the tune of $500,000. Described as a ‘pay-for-content ecosystem’, OwnZones raised the capital to step up development of its digital paid content delivery and subscription platform.
Here’s the boilerplate description found at the bottom of the company’s press release, which sets the bar rather high – even for, well, a company’s boilerplate description:
OwnZones Media Network, Inc. has created the technological ecosystem that will forever transform the way consumers, digital content providers and advertisers interact. With its innovative aggregation and curation platform, OwnZones will be the driving force in the transition from free to paid-for content on the Internet.
I’m still not 100% sure how they plan to do that, exactly, but the company says it will soon be launching the first of four trials with a “go-live” release in January, 2012, so we’ll have to wait and see.
From what I can gather, the business model is almost entirely based on the notion that consumers will be more than happy to pay for personalized, targeted ‘quality’ content on the web, and that people will be increasingly inclined to ignore and avoid much of the low-value drivel that can be found online.
Which, I’m sorry to say, may just be a good deal of wishful thinking on OwnZones’ behalf.
Publishers, of course, tend to be eager to subscribe to that vision. Indeed, OwnZones says it is currently in ‘final stage negotiations’ with a range of print and video content publishers to enhance its current content offerings.