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FeedBurner Moves Onto The Web
FeedBurner (a Union Square Ventures portfolio company) has been all about feeds for as long as I've known them. I started using FeedBurner to host the feeds from this blog in early 2004, less than a month after they launched their service.
And they've done an amazing job of becoming the best choice for hosting feeds, marketing feeds, reporting on feeds, and monetizing feeds. That's why they host over 280,000 feeds and that number grows every day.
But today, FeedBurner announced something that I think its a big deal. They are now allowing publishers to run FeedBurner powered ads not only in their feeds but also on the publisher's web pages. I've written before about how the feed layout is becoming a metaphor for what the page layout should be.
When advertising can be targeted against a specific post, the ad should be next to the post, not somewhere lost on the sidebar. This screenshot from FeedBurner's blog this morning (next to a post about landing Wired, which is pretty big news too) shows how the ads will look.
If you use FeedBurner and want to turn this feature on, just go to your FeedBurner monetize page and select "configure ads" and look for the check box that says "display ads on my web site". If its there (it may not be for all publishers, they are going to roll this out gradually), in about two weeks you'll start seeing ads between your posts.
As Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner says in the blog post announcing this service,
[The} feed meta data [delivers] extra context that's available via the feed that provides the framework for new and better ad units. Ads that shift to the latest permalinks on a site, ads that only appear/disappear once a post has comments, serialized campaigns on a page that understand page/article sequence, etc.
The bottom line is this is new web page ad inventory, but also smart inventory that reacts to what is happening with the post it is attached to. FeedBurner continues to lead the way in monetizing microchunked content and I have to say I am thrilled to have a ringside seat to watch them work their magic.
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» Feedburner Adds Web Page Ads from Conversion Rater
Already a leader in the RSS ad network space, Feedburner has moved further into the web page space by making ads available in between blog posts and content items. Feedburner investor Fred Wilson also comments on it and why he thinks this is a good mo... [Read More]
Tracked on May 17, 2006 3:03:27 AM
» Feedburner Ramps Up Ad Network from Read/WriteWeb
Feedburner has been running ads in feeds for a little while now. They have a slick self-service system for publishers to select which ads run in their feeds, which personally I've been happy with (it allows me to delete any... [Read More]
Tracked on May 17, 2006 5:12:51 PM
» Feedburner Ramps Up Ad Network from Read/WriteWeb
Feedburner has been running ads in feeds for a little while now. They have a slick self-service system for publishers to select which ads run in their feeds, which personally I've been happy with (it allows me to delete any... [Read More]
Tracked on May 17, 2006 5:15:30 PM
» Feedburner Ramps Up Ad Network from Read/WriteWeb
Feedburner has been running ads in feeds for a little while now. They have a slick self-service system for publishers to select which ads run in their feeds, which personally I've been happy with (it allows me to delete any... [Read More]
Tracked on May 17, 2006 5:17:29 PM
» Feedburner Ramps Up Ad Network from Read/WriteWeb
Feedburner has been running ads in feeds for a little while now. They have a slick self-service system for publishers to select which ads run in their feeds, which personally I've been happy with (it allows me to delete any... [Read More]
Tracked on May 17, 2006 5:19:00 PM
Posted May 16, 2006 in Venture Capital and TechnologyComments
So ads are optional?
What's the business model?
Who in their right mind would voluntarily view ads?
Sorry if my cynicism is getting in the way of understanding how this company aims to create revenue.
Posted by: Dave | May 16, 2006 4:31:49 PM
OK, now I see that it the publishers themselves who choose whether to have ads or not; that makes more sense.
But then what's to prevent me (or anyone else) from choosing to use an ad-frees news aggregating service?
It seems to me that the barriers to entry in this space are surprisingly low (just write code, publicize your application, etc.) So what's the competitive advantage?
Posted by: Dave | May 16, 2006 4:47:44 PM
Sounds smart to me. Putting ads between your posts isn't the easiest thing to do. Are they contextual? Is this something that could be run alongside Adsense?
Posted by: Pete Cashmore | May 16, 2006 6:39:11 PM
It appears that instead of scraping the sites to determine which contextual ads to display, they are using the clean rss or atom feed content to do that. Not only that, the service will change the ads as the comments and trackbacks change (if the feeds include that info). Its brilliant.
Posted by: buk | May 17, 2006 5:02:49 PM
So Fred, will you ditch Federated Media for feedburner? Keep both?
Posted by: PG | May 17, 2006 8:05:15 PM
Cool service, I was wondering if you could run this alongside Google AdSense as well. Google states that in their policy "We do not permit Google ads or search boxes accessing Google search services to be published on web pages that also contain what could be considered competing ads or services. If you have elected to receive contextually-targeted Google ads, this would include all other contextually-targeted ads or links on the same page as Google ads." Sounds like to me that we can't run Google Adsense and Feedburner on the same page, bummer, another decision to make. Thanks for the post Fred.
Posted by: Chris | May 24, 2006 11:04:16 PM
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