Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog

Enhanced Advertising Services: 2 of N

On the heels of our first announcement on the topic, we follow up with the availability of a self-service interface designed to make the ad-buying process easier for advertisers. The new self-service tools provide a quick way to bypass human contact and purchase media directly via the FeedBurner Web site. If you are a media buyer, ad agency or marketer looking to participate in this new medium, this is the place.

Publisher Impact
The launch of these new tools will help us support our primary goal to provide value-add services for content publishers. More advertiser demand means more money-making opportunties for participating publishers. As always, participation is optional and publishers get the final say as to what ads, if any, run in their feeds. The approval process is automated and integrated into your existing feed management dashboard. A full list of Publisher FAQs is available in our Support Forums.

Get Started Now
Learn more about our available channels, view a list of participating publishers, check out current ad specifications and even watch a short demo (1:50, 2.8MB) on how to set up a campaign.

Our self-serve tools are supported by a very friendly Ad Operations team. Questions? Get in touch through all of the regular means including email, shortwave radio, etc.

We will continue to focus on and expand this part of the toolset for publishers and advertisers over the course of the next 8 to 12 weeks, culminating in a suite of services this summer about which we are so excited we can barely contain ourselves. More to come.

Burnvelopes? No, FeedBurner Email

It turns out that not everybody is quite ready to ditch the old Inbox just yet. People like to be notified when their favorite publishers have something new posted, but a large audience still finds the familiar setting of email to be the most comfortable and reliable way to receive updates. We initially announced feed-by-email support back in October. Since then, we have been asked by a number of our publishers to integrate our own feed-powered email update service, and we are the kind of people who do what is asked of us, if the question is asked nicely, in lower case, with a minimum of question marks.

Today, we launch...are you ready for the catchy name? FeedBurner Email. There are a few specific questions we want to answer about our mail service, not the least of which is where can you find it and who is the branding genius that came up with the reflexive moniker?

There are several feed-to-email services in the marketplace. Ours has a very specific focus that is different from some of the other offerings. FeedBurner Email is strictly a publisher service. There is no subscriber landing page at FeedBurner, no dashboard for subscribers to login to and manage their emails, and so on. Just easy-to-read, plain text or HTML email containing the latest posts. The messages that go out are largely "brandless," by which we mean that a) the emails are delivered as "from" the publisher, not FeedBurner and b) there is no FeedBurner header and only a very light "delivered by" footer. Publishers have access to the email addresses that subscribe to their feed, and they can export these addresses and move from FeedBurner to another service at any time. View a sample FeedBurner Email.

As we continue to build out email capability, we want to give publishers options. We will continue to promote our partner services, FeedBlitz and Squeet, and we may add further services as well. FeedBlitz provides a robust set of both publisher and subscriber tools, and we added Squeet to the lineup because some publishers wanted to offer a much more subscriber-focused experience where the subscriber is in full control of the delivery schedule, etc.

This version of FeedBurner Email is — the tension builds — free! To activate this service, log into your FeedBurner account and make your way to the "Publicize" tab. We will be adding a premium version of the service that will provide publisher-selected delivery scheduling options as well as branding capabilities. We also will be adding a number of other enhancements to the premium version, but as the service's chief architect is on vacation right now, it's probably not fair for us to publicly announce deliverables while he's at the beach. By the way, always a good idea to launch a new service when the chief architect is unavailable for questions. That's a little something we like to call "rolling hard six."

Expanding Universe: Podcasting Market Update

Podcasting - fad or changing media landscape? (Disclaimer: the Web 2.0 police require the use of "changing media landscape" and/or "mash-up" in all communications). As discussion about the growth of podcasting percolates in the industry, we thought it was a good time to release some statistics from the point of view of the world's largest manager of podcast feeds (ahem, over here, that's us). After just 18 months since enclosures started finding their way onto iPods everywhere, podcasting has already made a significant impact on the creation and consumption of content worldwide. Consider:

1. FeedBurner alone manages more podcasts than there are radio stations worldwide (yep, we looked it up)
2. Podcasting is outpacing the speed of adoption of the last "most successful consumer product launch in history" (more on that in a minute)
3. Podcast directories are growing, and driving activity back to podcasters' originating Web sites. As we saw with text feeds, distribution begins as a mechanism to drive traffic back to the originating source and then evolves to become its own consumption medium

First, The Bigger Picture
At the time of this update, more than 168,000 publishers (bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers) call FeedBurner home. This translates to over a quarter of a million feeds under FeedBurner management, and over 60 million feed requests a day by an aggregate subscriber base in excess of 11 million. FeedBurner's global market stats continue to paint a picture of steady growth across all flavors of feeds - text, audio and video. Podcast feeds (those that contain a media enclosure) represent just under 20% of all FeedBurner feeds and this percentage is consistent with the more than 1,000 new feeds created every day at feedburner.com.

More Podcasts Than Radio Stations Worldwide
FeedBurner recently surpassed a major milestone of 44,000 podcast feeds under management which, according to the CIA World Factbook, exceeds the total number of radio stations worldwide. Since our last update on the topic, the creation of podcast feeds has averaged 15% growth month over month. You can get a sense for this growth by reviewing the chart below. Or, if you prefer a more active audio/visual experience, check out Feedstorm. Or, you can ignore both and just trust us.

Continue reading "Expanding Universe: Podcasting Market Update..."

Feed Fiber

FeedBurner has reached a point where we will very soon begin sending out over 100Mb/second of feed content. Those of you playing the Ethernet home game (it's WANtastic!) will recognize 100Mb/sec as the upper limit on Ethernet traffic, so we have spent the last couple weeks preparing to upgrade to gigabit connectivity, which mostly involves paying more money for switches that look like the other switches that didn't cost so much money. Saturday, we spent a couple restful hours (and by "we", I mean "Joe and Paul") at our central hosting facility in Chicago swapping out Ethernet gear and replacing it with gigabit gear throughout the network. We were able to take our time swapping the gear in production, because of Feed Insurance, which we first described on January 5. While connectivity was interrupted in Chicago for only 1 minute total, we leveraged Feed Insurance, a second FeedBurner facility that served all feed traffic during that time. In order to both test Feed Insurance and upgrade to gigabit connectivity, we moved all the feed traffic to the second facility well in advance of the Chicago upgrade, watched the traffic migrate, connected the new gigabit gear in Chicago, and then brought the traffic back to Chicago. This was all transparent to feed subscribers, as our secondary facility was serving up the most recent copy of your feed. In its current configuration, Feed Insurance does not allow publishers to make feed configuration changes while running through the secondary facility. That's a logical next step for more thorough geo-redundancy. Publishers will see Feed Insurance bots polling their feeds. We will continue to expand our scalability and availability systems, and we may continue to test more Feed Insurance upgrades from time to time (additional remote facilities, geo-distributed feed serving, etc.), so next time you see the Feed Insurance message on our site, you'll know that Joe and Paul are spending another beautiful Saturday morning moving traffic around.

Enhanced Advertising Services: 1 of N

Today is the first in a string of announcements over the next couple months for publishers who want to make money from their content. The key word is “string,” implying “more than one” announcement. Before discussing today's enhancements, we'll briefly draw our roadmap for you. FeedBurner plans to:

• Provide publishers and advertisers with a variety of self-service tools
• Gradually but increasingly open the FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN) to more and more publishers
• Provide publishers with capabilities to leverage the power of FAN back on the originating website in new and interesting ways

As always, we start with metrics
Today we are rolling out more integrated and detailed analytics for advertising performance and resulting winnings, er... estimated payments. Publishers who are currently participating in FAN can now review this information from the "Analyze" tab. There is also an account-level dashboard that summarizes financials across feeds for publishers with multiple feeds in the network.

Services for advertisers, too
We have also added new features for all of the advertisers participating in the network. Our new real-time dashboard allows advertisers to review campaign performance and monitor activity. If you are an advertiser interested in reaching millions of subscribers across a wide variety of content channels, email the ad team.

FAN will open more broadly in the coming months
We want to make sure the network performs as it's intended and all participants find the experience worthwhile (read: they generate revenue). By gradually expanding and taking a measured approach to adding services, we are better positioned to help you. As you know, participation is totally optional and you decide if you want to play. We'll alert you as to your feed's eligibility on the "Monetize" tab of the application.

Why can't more publishers play in the money sandbox now?
Ad networks like FAN always face a challenge in balancing supply and demand as they grow. Bring in too many publishers right away without advertisers, and the publishers get angry, take up arms, and attack. Sign up too many advertisers before there is enough quality and quantity of content and the advertisers take their hip black tshirts and Cosmopolitans and slide down to the other end of the bar. Even with the measured approach we are taking, there are supply/demand balances we need to strike. We determine readiness for the network through a variety of factors including the popularity of the feed and advertiser demand for specific content. We're really excited about all of the FAN-related news to come. Drop us a note if you have questions.

Headline Animator now an Email-Friendly Feed Promoter

From the Quick Updates to Popular Features Dept.: Our long-standing Headline Animator service uses your feed to create a nifty graphical badge you can use to promote the last five headlines from your blog, podcast or commercial publication while promoting subscription to your content. Many publishers have told us they would like to use Headline Animator at the bottom of their HTML emails but want a graphical format that better resembles a closing "signature" block. In response, FeedBurner now offers a new style choice, complete with a dramatic new title: Email Signature Animator. (Emphasis ours!)

This version doesn't feature that stainless steel kitchen-of-the-future feel of the original, but hey, brushed metal isn't for everybody. And now when your email recipients click the new Headline Animator, they will be sent your feed, where they can quickly subscribe. Look for the new Headline Animator option under the 'Publicize' tab and start promoting your feed today.

Quick note for existing Headline Animator users: You can only have one style of Animator active per feed; it has to be set to either the Classic Headline Animator or the new Email Signature Animator style.

We know that everybody wants to see even more variability in the Headline Animator. We are hard at work on two other product lines right now, but we're going to keep cycling back to these publicity tools from time to time and expand the existing offerings.

We'll close with a sample Email Signature Animator for the Burning Questions feed:

Bienvenidos Publishers y Advertisers

Más feeds means más opportunities in the FeedBurner Ad Network. As more and more Spanish language publishers have added feeds to FeedBurner, we are now offering targeted advertising opportunities for Spanish language content. The available inventory consists of content from some of the top blogs, blog networks and popular sites across geographies and subject matter, including Weblogs SL's Xataca and Hipertextual's Alt1040. Many of the feeds already have tens of thousands of subscribers. If people in the office would stop joking around and give us the proper combination of ALT-key sequences to make an upside down question mark, none of which have yet resulted in an upside down question mark, we could properly ask a few rhetorical questions about our excitement at this continued expansion.

Yahoo! España is running the inaugural advertising campaign in many of our Spanish language feeds. The campaign promotes the use Mi Yahoo! as an easy way to read feeds. Read about the launch in our press release or subscribe to the Spanish version of our blog, Ardiendo for more info.

Eduardo Arcos, CEO of Hipertextual, has this to say, "We have a very good understanding of our readership via RSS feeds because of FeedBurner. The potential for advertising campaigns within feeds is huge and we know FeedBurner is the best company to handle it."

While we're on the topic of Spanish-related things, we also want to point out the availability of FuenteClara, our BrowserFriendly service that is designed to make the feed subscription process easier for those who may not know their XML code from their favorite Museo del Jamón. Also, there are a number of Spanish FeedFlare units that have been developed including Mariano Di Biase's "Post to Meneame".

If you are interested in advertising to subscribers of Spanish-speaking feeds or you want to learn more about FeedBurner services, email our reseller Kanben Consulting, S.L. for more information.

Here and There

To the travel-weary making the rounds at all of the recent conferences, may your airline miles reflect the magic and wonder of the season. The FeedBurner team has likely been in some of the same terminals, probably foraging for some of the same stale gift shop snack mix. You may remember us from such events as ETech, where Eric presented Feedstorm, or SXSW where Chris talked about Feeds moving beyond blogs. Rick participated on panels at SES NY and the Politics Online conference in DC while Steve represented FeedBurner in Asia at Feedsphere and NextWeb.

If you want to catch up with us over the next few months, we'll be spreading the feed gospel just as fervently (and hopefully in more Spring-like conditions). Look for us tonight at the SDForum Search SIG event, "The Search for Attention," 6:30pm @ AOL. Next week, Rick will be at the Publishing Executive Management Conference at the Hiton in NYC. His panel, Exploring RSS, is Tuesday, March 21, 2006, 2:45 PM to 3:45 PM. You can also catch Rick on the West coast at OMMA in Hollywood. Steve will be in Europe for the Blog and Social Forum and SES Milan while Joe will talk about scalable Web applications at the MySQL Users Conference. Finally, check out Shojiro Inoue from our Japan-based team at the 70th E-Business Conference and the Web Business Shuffle 2.0.

Want to set up time to chat at any of these events? Drop us an email. Also, if you have a related event coming up, get in touch and let us know about it.

Califeedication

In support of our steady growth (now up to a quarter million feeds for those scoring on the FeedBurner Home Game), we are excited to announce a new branch office in San Francisco. FeedBurner still calls the very windy city of Chicago "home" along with resellers in both Europe and Asia. The addition of this branch office will help us better serve our strategic partners on the West Coast and give us a place to call "home away from home." (But don't expect us to start pronouncing "GIF" like the peanut butter, or using the word "grok" in any of our postings here.)

Also in support of this expansion, we are excited to announce that Don Loeb will be joining the FeedBurner team as Vice President of Business Development, Strategic Partnerships. Don was previously director of business development for Yahoo!'s Network Products business unit and has been a friend of FeedBurner for decades. He will lead strategic development efforts from the new office.

You can read more about our expansion in the release. Meanwhile, we'll continue to work out a strategy for opening our next branch office in Ibiza.

Newsweek Adds Flare

Newsweek becomes the first major consumer news magazine to not only adopt the full breadth of FeedBurner feed management solutions, but also to offer its subscribers with an easy means to tag and share Newsweek.com content using FeedFlare. From top headlines to politics and even popular columnists, Newsweek's feed subscribers will receive the specific content they want, delivered where they want it. Newsweek.com also plans to participate in the FeedBurner Ad Network. Check out the release for more information.

Speaking of FeedFlare, the catalog of "interactive" services you can add to each of the items in your feed continues to grow. Look at the growing list of FeedFlare units that are being built by developers from all over the world including Anton Antich's "English-to-Russian" translation, Oliver Brown's "Item Age" and Pat McCarty's "Seed This" FeedFlare for Newsvine. Develop yours today!