Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog

FeedBurner Fully Financed For Future Feed Formatting Fun

We are pleased to announce that we have completed a $7 million second round of financing for the company. Mobius Venture Capital led the round and was joined by new investor Sutter Hill Ventures and existing investors Portage Venture Partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

We have grown faster than expected over the past six months, and we now manage over 40,000 active feeds. We have a number of unannounced partnerships in place and a growing demand for bulk feed management services, all while the variety and capabilities of feed clients and syndication bots continues to expand. We have come a long way with five people, but the expanding opportunity, the number of product innovations on our roadmap, and our desire to provide detailed and honest customer support to all of our users demand that we seize the moment and grow the business.

The funding is coincident with a rise in the popularity of our service, and the timing warrants more transparency about our plans for the company, the business model, and most importantly, what this means for our publishers.

Business Model

All of the free publisher services that we now offer will remain free, and we will continue to expand our suite of free publisher services. Further, we will only provide those services on a feed that a publisher has specifically selected. FeedBurner's core competency is managing complexity, and as a function of managing complexity, we provide detailed analytics and economic opportunities for publishers. Of course, we handle feed transformations and format conversions, but these are relatively well understood and straightforward mappings. More importantly, we manage the spiraling complexity of a growing and disparate number of feed extensions on the publishing side along with an exploding number of clients and syndication bots that have markedly different capabilities and characteristics across the spectrum of endpoints. We believe this complexity will continue to increase in ways that cannot be predicted. Indeed, we certainly could not have anticipated podcasting even last summer, and yet, today there are a growing number of podcasting specific clients, growing belief that the devices themselves will become readers, etc. We will see the same thing happen for video, photos, products for sale, and more.

FeedBurner will provide the opportunity for publishers to monetize their content in syndication, FeedBurner will provide a number of new and fee-based premium publisher services, and FeedBurner will provide bulk feed management services to small, medium, large, and humungous commercial publishers.

First, a word about monetizing feed content, aka "ads in feeds". We have been conducting trials for some months now and have a wealth of data and lessons learned on the topic. We have not yet rolled out these programs for publishers more broadly because there are still issues that remain to be addressed and questions for which we don't yet fully have the right answers. It's important to us that we proceed carefully and in a manner that's extensible and considerate of the different ways in which the market may evolve. Again, we will only apply those services to feeds that our publishers specifically select.

Next, a bit about premium services. The premium services we roll out will generally (but not always) be much more detailed versions of a free service. We are currently testing Total Stats Pro, a premium version of our free statistics service, and we hope to roll this out shortly once we've incorporated feedback from publishers testing the service. We will have much more to say about Total Stats Pro as soon as we roll it out, but as one might imagine, it provides another level of detail and insight into feed consumption over the free stats service. There are a number of other premium services on deck, some of which we've discussed in responses to specific questions in the support forums.

Finally, bulk feed management; we are currently managing tens, hundreds, and thousands of feeds for publishers that want an intimate understanding of feed consumption across a variety of their properties or content sources. We will be providing publishers large and small with tools, services, and metrics to efficiently support bulk feed management in the coming months.

Using FeedBurner

We are well funded by investors who share our vision for the company, and this will enable us to provide a more thorough suite of publisher services. Our existing free services will remain free. There will be new free services, expansions of existing free services, new premium services, the same dedication to customer support we've provided since day one, and hopefully, an office that my daughter can walk into without saying "is this it?"