[davidalln]

Maybe they will get money from developers of the APIs opting into their service. As in, give us $X a month, and we will handle all your embedding needs and get your content out there to a ton of different services.

Like, think if Embedly was used for some music recommendation application that pulled together results from Last.fm, Pandora, Grooveshark, and Mog. If I was a developer of an up and coming music playing/recommendation site, I would definitely pay some dough to get included in that group for the web application. It's a win-win, the developer of the mashup gets access to a greater variety of content, I, as the developer of the new music service site, get my website's name out there, and Embedly gets money in the process.

[mshafrir]

But if I, as a developer of a mashup, wanted to use this new music recommendation site and Embedly didn't offer it because that site didn't want to pay up, I could just circumvent Embedly and go against the site's API directly at little cost.