Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog

Requests. We Get Requests

We have received quite a few emails recently from our publishers, asking us if we will offer a service that allows our publishers to insert advertisements into their feeds. We thought we would use this public forum to provide everybody with some general thoughts and comments on this topic.

First, let us point out that we will not create any service that we apply to a publisher's feed "by default". The only services that will be applied to your feeds are the services you select. We are aware that there are a couple of sites out there that have recently begun to insert advertisements into feeds without warning and without providing an opt-out capability. That's not the type of relationship we plan on having with our publishers.

Next, there are a lot of wrong ways to do ads in feeds, and a couple hard but correct ways to do ads in feeds. As you might expect, we are building technology that will enable inserting ads in feeds "the right way". We won't go into all the fabulous details here, but by way of one simple example, you don't want a new ad to cause the feed to appear "updated" in a client or aggregator, you only want new content to "update" the feed. Also, in the web world, a client is a client. In syndication, clients are getting more specialized, more sophisicated, and we're already starting to see a wide variety of display characteristics on some of the emerging niche clients (screen savers, mobile clients, some new aggregators). The right way to build services is in a manner that encourages the emergence of as many new and different clients as possible that will "just work" with our services. So, there's all that to worry about.

Finally, while FeedBurner is a publisher facing service, we need to be cognizant of the fact that syndication doesn't work without lots and lots of subscribers. Any service that we create should foster subscriber growth, not potentially impede it. That's a bit of an obtuse statement when it comes to advertising, but we just want to highlight the fact that we are trying to think about this issue from every angle, and we think it is possible to provide a framework that meets the goals and desires of all parties.

A long way of answering all those emails we're getting. The short answer, for those of you who do want the OPTION of inserting ads in your feeds, is "stay tuned".