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Intubus, a Ukrainian startup, has just launched its beta, offering its users complete control over the content they publish online. Whether music, movies, images, or text, Intubus allows users to create widgets and design ads to manage their intellectual property and to reap the profits from the work by selling it through their social media account, websites and websites. 

As a startup, Intubus is basically still in its infancy. Though founded in 2011, the company only recently completed the prototype for its service. I spoke with one of the company’s founders, Vitalii Soldatenko, and he told me that, while they are seeking investors and are just now releasing their service to the public, funding has not been an issue because they have been able to self-fund their project via Ivexe Innovation Ventures. Regarding the service, Soldatenko told me that users will be able to name their own price and that revenue from their accounts will be deposited directly into their PayPal accounts. Advantages Intubus promotes are copyright control, files and widgets statistics, and publishing tools. People interested in using this service can create a free account on the site or can sign in to the service through Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ and Soldatenko says that Intubus plans to target the American and European market. 

There are a number of competitors in this industry, but perhaps most notable is the American startup Gumroad, which announced last May that it had raised a $7 million (about 5,2 million euro) A round. Such a sum seems to offer it a clear advantage over newcomers to this field. Local competitors in this industry include SellBox, a Polish startup which allows users to sell content through Dropbox or Google Drive and charges a 5% fee, and Sellfy, a Latvian startup start based upon the same concept and which allows users to post a link on their pages and sell content. Like SellBoxHQ and Gumroad, Sellfy also charges a 5% fee for every transaction completed. Unlike these two services, materials given to me by Mr. Soldatenko indicate that Intubus does not intend to charge users commission to sell their digital content. Here is where we see the basic trade-off. Whereas SellBoxHQ and Sellfy both charge a small fee for completed transactions, both have already established themselves somewhat and have developed a userbase.

Soldatenko says that users will not only sell content through Intubus, but also can store files, create affiliate programs, personal digital content store, get statistics and get additional services, the startup went for a subscription based model, where a flat fee will be charged for all its cloud services.

Intubus offers a more affordable service (you can’t beat free), but it remains to be seen how the company will grow as reaching the customers may be an expensive exercise.

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