A Feed Subscription Marketing Ecosystem

I've often thought that the most natural way to monetize feeds is to showcase other feeds that you can subscribe to. Use feeds to market other feeds.

So I've decided to try that concept out. I've made up an ad for this blog's feed. It looks like this:

And I am now running it in a number of channels in the FeedBurner ad network. Those of you who use FAN to monetize your feed have probably seen this ad come across your desk for approval this morning. I hope you approved it.

Here's how I am thinking about it. I make about $1000 per month with FeedBurner. So I am going to use half of that money to market my blog's feed. What I want to see is how much I can increase my feed subs with that money.

Each blog sub is worth about $0.10/month to me (I have about 10,000 subs). Let's assume that the average subscriber stays with me for 6 months (I honestly don't know and I need FeedBurner to give me the tools to figure that out). Then the lifetime value of a sub is $0.60. If I spend $500/month, I'll need to add 830 subs each month to breakeven.

I don't know that I will breakeven on the deal. But I'll learn a lot. I know how many impressions I am getting. I'll know how many subs I get from the deal. And that will tell me what the right cpm to pay going forward.

I'll keep you all posted on how this experiment goes.

Comments (12) | Posted January 12, 2007 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

Interesting experiment. Thanks for sharing.

The major challenge I see is whether web users will be willing to subscribe to a new feed without first visiting the site. As such, I'd think actually advertising your site (instead of your feed) would make more sense. You'd then convert some percentage of the website visitors to subscribers.

But, you could be right. Will be interesting to see the results.

Posted by: Dharmesh Shah | Jan 12, 2007 2:08:41 PM

Great stuff! How'd you make the custom background with your Feedburner ad? I tried using Headline Animator's custom design, but couldn't import graphics.

Keep up the great blogging. You're a pleasure to read, and you strike the perfect balance between talking business and humanizing yourself with occasional personal details (love the music recommendations)

Posted by: Rob Wolf | Jan 12, 2007 2:35:52 PM

I wish that Feedburner offered a way for me, as part of the FAN network, to view existing ads and add them to my site & feed and then maybe get paid at a discount.

Maybe that's too much to ask.

Posted by: Rick | Jan 12, 2007 3:13:53 PM

Is it me or am I missing the ad on the page that you are describing?

And BTW start using the coolest widget ever. It is our audio widget at www.mychingo.com .

Posted by: Jeff | Jan 12, 2007 4:56:43 PM

Fred --

As you know, I LOVE this idea. I'd like to add an offer -- we TODAY launched our new design of www.buzztracker.com which not only incorporates a new design but also is crawling over 90K content sources, is much faster etc. We're not quite out of Beta yet as we have a very important feature, Create A Topic coming.

In any case, here's my offer to readers of this blog -- For anyone who sends me their RSS ad for their blog in a 300x250 format, I will commit to running their ad in high rotation through the end of March.

Please shoot me your ad at info -at- participatemedia dot com

--Alan

Posted by: AlFromChicago | Jan 12, 2007 5:03:11 PM

Fred,

While I think that promoting your blog via Feedburner is an interesting idea, I'm a bit concerned about the execution.

I have Tom Evslin's feed right below yours in Bloglines, and every single one of his posts had an identical ad for AVC.

Does Feedburner's ad system have any way to cut down on these repeat impressions?

Posted by: Chris Yeh | Jan 12, 2007 6:49:01 PM

Huh, I get the image of the ad in my rss feed through Thunderbird but not on the regular url page. Weird!

Posted by: Jeff | Jan 12, 2007 7:05:22 PM

Hi Fred,

I really really like this idea. However, one idea ... I actually think the idea would be much better if you the advertisement was a Cost per Subscription - instead of CPM.

The idea is Bloggers like you could promote your feeds. But also, commercial feeds like Nike could promote feeds - think their soccer feed Ronaldinho - to subscribers.

The advertiser could say what they’d pay / subscription and then the feed publisher would decide either to automate the placement of these ads or trust the network system to chose the best feed to promote.

Anyway, love the blog! Keep up the great work!

- Sean

Posted by: Sean Ammirati | Jan 12, 2007 9:18:08 PM

The income per subscriber numbers are a little on the low side compared to what might be hoped for from an email mailing list.
Obviously there are additional benefits to your core business, and so the blog monetization is almost irrelevant.
Using the proceeds of traffic for further traffic generation is a great way to snowball your business.
Another way to help achieve this is to place RSS subscriptions as a higher priority in your blog design.

As you are a supporter of MyBlogLog and looking to increase the width of your readership, I decided to include you in my new MyBlogLog meme.

http://andybeard.eu/2007/01/mybloglog-community-meme.html

Posted by: Andy Beard | Jan 13, 2007 12:03:17 PM

Sean, you have hit the nail on the head. The best way to execute this would be CPS, in which the advertiser bids a CPS price. It takes time to get these bidded ecosystems going for all sorts of reasons, some obvious and some less so. Chris, we are playing with some knobs and dials on the ad server and this issue that you see will go away.

Posted by: Dick Costolo | Jan 13, 2007 12:09:19 PM

Good luck to you, I wish you luck. I am actually curious how well you do to see if I should add a similar program in the future.

Posted by: Dustin | Jan 15, 2007 10:58:08 AM

Dick,
Glad you think so! On a completely unrelated note ...

I'm doing some research with the NAA on RSS that I should share with you. Send me a note to sammirati@mspoke.com, so I can forward it on to you when its released.

- Sean

Posted by: Sean Ammirati | Jan 21, 2007 2:34:19 PM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC