FeedBurner Archive

Duncan Riley is reporting that former FeedBurner CFO (before they were acquired by Google) has left Google to join Vibes Media.

Riley notes, "He also headed up Yahoo’s business operations for some time before his FeedBurner days. Chicago-based Vibes Media has been creating text message-based marketing campaigns for a full decade. As such, we pity its employees’ social lives; surely chicks can’t be willing to hand over their digits to a guy whose job involves sending out text ads."

We’ve also learned that former head of PR for FeedBurner Traci Hailpern left Google in June.

Earlier today we reported on the Google announcement that Google AdSense ads will soon be available in FeedBurner feeds. Overall I think this is a good step forward to get us all discussing RSS monetization. I still believe that paying a small amount for a full feed with no ads will be the most popular way by the end of the year. If a person isn’t interested in paying, then they get a partial feed with ads that drives back to the site. With the speed of mobile devices and broadband connections, there’s no reason to not want to visit the content creator’s site.

I am very interested in feedback on the above and your ideas on how RSS will be monetized. This overall discussion could become one of the hot topics later this year.

Here are some of my thoughts on this announcement via video:

Update: I’ve added a video on the topic of RSS monetization and the news below.

A month ago today we wrote that Google AdSense for FeedBurner RSS feeds was coming and today we have learned more details via a blog post on the FeedBurner site. Starting next week, a select group of publishers who are part of the FeedBurner Ad Network (we are part but apparently not in the test group) will begin to push Google AdSense ads out to their feeds.

Eventually the program will open to anyone using Google AdSense and seems to be driven through the AdSense program rather than the FeedBurner program.

FeedBurner suggests that those of us in the Ad Network will continue to run "premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content" — I have watched the number of these premium ads drop like a rock since FeedBurner sold to Google and it was a fear of mine which sadly has been realized.

Maybe after Google AdSense pushes out to the mass, my "buck a feed" concept might actually start to move forward.

Digital Inspiration found some Google ads in feeds a month ago – remember that there’s no JavaScript in a feed so these ads will be run via a HTML imagemap.

Late last week, Steve from FeedBurner (owned by Google) posted an entry explaining that you will soon be able to login to your FeedBurner account using your Google account. This isn’t really that exciting but it does mean that Google can now tie even more together.

The juicy part of the entry was Steve’s comments regarding the FeedBurner integration with Google AdSense. Steve noted:

FeedBurner will start to look and feel more like a set of Google services, and we will be completing much tighter integration into other Google services such as Google AdSense. (If you are a feed advertiser, don’t worry: we have some happy surprises coming for you as well, and if you are an advertiser who is not yet a feed advertiser, you too shall be blessed with good fortune.)

Last month I asked whether FeedBurner had given up on its own ad network. Note that FeedBurner currently serves over 1.5 million feeds. The FeedBurner ad network was one of my absolute favorites over the past year – the CPMs were very high and the ad quality was exceptional. The fill rate wasn’t all that great but overall it was a very impressive program. Looks like the program will probably go bye-bye, replaced with the lovely tiny text ads that only pay on a click or worse, an acquisition. 

Over time what this will mean is that RSS feeds might become cluttered just like Web sites and the quality of ads will be lowered. On a positive note, perhaps this will finally get us talking about my buck a feed concept!

Lastly, I wonder if this move will push some FB publishers away – could this be an ideal opportunity for another RSS play to make a move? Are you looking forward to AdSense in feeds?

When CN was accepted into the FeedBurner ad network, I was very excited after all of the positive reviews I’d read. From the early days, FeedBurner was able to sell great quality ads at amazing CPMs — the typical CPM averaged at $8-10. While the fill rates were never great, the income was better than any of the other ad networks we were using. The FeedBurner ad network offers publishers a way to add advertisements into feeds hosted by FeedBurner along with ads on the site in posts supported by a feed.

Last June I wrote about my somewhat selfish-fears about Google acquiring FeedBurner and what would happen to the ad network. It looks like my fears might just be coming true.

In August FeedBurner began offering a self-service ad model which if you are reading this in a RSS reader you might see one of those ads. Most of these ads are feeds from other sites that rotate through on mine. The CPM rates are mostly $3/CPM with some $6/CPM. Fill rate overall has been ok at best but a nice additional boost in overall fill rate.

What I’ve experienced since the 3rd quarter 2007 is a slow dropoff in the number of big name advertisers using FeedBurner. This was just about the time that FB introduced the ability to run Google AdSense within the Web site ad spot. While AdSense is currently not available inside feeds, could it be far off? I’ve hoped that FB would keep their own sales staff and sell the higher quality ads that they have since the beginning but I fear that we will soon see AdSense in the feeds.

If you are using the FeedBurner ad network for your feed, what’s the fill rate and ad selection look like for you?

Update: as I noted, it appears Google probably forgot to move the clocks causing a shift in the time-space warp. Dick from FB reports that numbers should be back on Monday. It seems Google was focusing on the OpenSocial launch. :-P

Appears that the time shift caused some weirdness at the offices of FeedBurner. I just got a note from Dr. Hung that he is seeing RSS subscriber counts across the FB network being nearly halved from yesterday’s counts. I can confirm that checking the CN count, it is down about 40% from the previous day. This comes nearly a month after the last FeedBurner bug which added 1 million new subscribers to the TechCrunch feed.

And yes, I still stand by my earlier comments that RSS subscriber numbers are the 2007 version of hits. But it’s a concern that actual readers might be affected.

If your subscriber counts are off, please report the % change in the comments below.

Update: Zoli is reporting (in the comments) that Google Feedcatcher is not reporting and that’s the reason for the downward movement.

Dick Costolo, CEO and co-founder of Feedburner, has been giving me a lot of free advice lately. I got to see him and Steve Olechowski at the Future of Web Apps and hear a little bit about being acquired and working for Google. Then he gave a must-watch presentation on their entrepreneurial experience and has been writing some great blog entries on similar topics. Dick’s got four start-ups under his belt and I took notes constantly.

I first met Dick in June 2004 when Kevin Werbach took pity on me and gave me a pass to attend Supernova. Not only had Dick just decided that txting ruld, but that making it easier to share and consume RSS feeds was very important. He was right on both. What they did with Feedburner was stunning. They made structured XML mark up extremely sexy and business-friendly.

But I’m wasting your time. What you should be reading are my below notes from Dick’s presentation and his recent blog entries on first hires, exit fallacy and start-up offices.

My notes from his talk:

• When hiring, looks for talented-at-anything people, not just position-perfect people. Plans will change and if people can’t move, it’s a major loss.
• Launch late and launch often. (By this he’s suggesting to not launch until you have a lot of features ready or almost ready. Launch with a solid core set, but then keep releasing new features quickly, some of which may have been ready at launch, but held to keep excitement up.)
• Don’t write pre-launch long-term business plans. They’ll be void within months of deployment.
• Keep your org chart as flat as possible for as long as possible. Reporting chains hinder fast, flexible development.
• Speed of execution is a competitive advantage. When you fear “Why won’t Google just copy your product once it’s live?” The answer is becasue we are fast and nimble and they are slow and hamstrung.
• Develop your service and business models the way an optometrist tests your eyes. They try 40 different combo’s of A vs B. to methodically find the best combination.
• Make it as easy as possible for the Markets to determine what your most valuable offering is. Allow them to tell you what your business is. Open, accessible businesses get scrubbed and reviewed by the business people of the world. The wisdom of those markets can often finds your true value offering much faster than you can in your board rooms. Secret, private companies do not get such benefits.
• Open APIs and the like make this happen ever faster. Dick thinks open APIs are a great business advantage as the Markets can even faster scrub your offerings. Even if it means your competition can benefit from it too, you will always be 2 steps ahead of them because you’ll be leading and they’ll be copying.
• You ALWAYS spend more money than you plan. Be brutal with your revenue forecasts and slash them to as small as they could be if nothing new happened other than what you’ve proven. [Ted note: trust me, only count on revenue you’ve already proven. Plan for growth, but do not require your company to achieve it.]
• Compete on your merits, not the short comings of your competitors. Your outward case for your company should be what you do better than anyone else, not that others do it worse than you.

Photo by Ted R. Hosted on Flickr. Trilby tip to Greg Cohn for pointer to Dick’s recent posts.

This article was contributed by Ted Rheingold who is a passionate thirty-something accidental entrepreneur and founder of Dogster and Catster. He writes about the biz and passion-centric online communities at the Dogster, Inc. company blog and his personal blog, Spidey Senses.