Feedburner to Serve Mo' Ads? - O Joy :(

Friday, May 18. 2007

Feedburner to Serve Mo' Ads? - O Joy :(

Sam Sethi reports today (aka fans the rumour) that Google will buy Feedburner (rumoured price $100m)

Why?

According to Sam:

Therefore I think it would be a smart move by Google to acquire FeedBurner, simply because Google could then start to serve their own ads (Adsense or DoubleClick) into the RSS stream.

I remember when people first started talking about advertising appearing within RSS feeds and the enormous backlash but slowly over time I have begun to notice more and more RSS feeds appearing in my reader with supporting adverts.

Slowly over time I have been getting more irritated by RSS feeds with Ads...let me be clear - any RSS feed I get with Ads in it gets turned off, (unless it pays me lots of money of course

Actually, Feedburner started serving Google AdSense in trial mode awhile back, see here for some of the issues today..

Valleywag sees Google's reasoning a bit differently

So, why would Google pay such a high multiple, about 10 times revenues, for the startup? Probably, for the same reason it has developed Google Analytics: it is another way for Google to tie in independent online publishers. Feedburner provides an array of services to sites, such as email newsletter publishing, and the integration of external news and photos. It is more valuable as a publishing service than an ad broker.

This makes more sense to me....irritating readers by pushing anwanted Ads on them has not shown iitself to be a viable strategy online so far (remeber popups....)

Now we use Feedburner (see right column by Feed Me Seymour), and I am saddened by all this....what I want is to serve our content cleanly to our readers, without other people putting their 2p worth of sponsors messages into it!

Prize for the first person to find us a "clean" Feedburner lookalike in that case

And of course whatever one in the GYM club has, the others want one too....Microsoft bought Acquantive for a cool $6bn.

I've added this on after reflecting on Sam's comment and my reply in the comments below. There are really 2 questions here:

1. Will ads be served via RSS distribution medium term?

2. If Google wants to get into rss distribution, should they buy Feedburner - for $100m - now when the answer to (1) is unclear

Firstly, will ads be served via rss - undoubtedly the distributors want to do this, but it will stand or fall on the user experience. In essence the history of the 'net (and most media) to date is that people have tended to avoid unwanted and intrusive ads. Irritating the reader is not an option medium term - its worth always bearing in mind that without the reader, the Ad is useless.

Secondly, should Google buy these guys for $100m? They have 3 other options, i.e. (i) "Do it Yourself", (ii) Buy someone else for less and strap them into the Google Machine, and (iii) buy Feedburner for less.

Technically it's probably an order of magnitude of cost less to build such a system. and Google's market power should (one would think) be enough to drive them into the market fairly quickly - so why not Do it Yourself, or just buy someone small who has already done this?

But for Google, $100m is spare change in the scheme of things, so they are not the company most likely to look at the price's implied business case too closely.

The real issue here is how sustainable is the Feedburner model...and that is the $100m+ question

Posted by Alan Patrick in Web Services / Cloud Computing at 22:31 | Comments (8) | Trackbacks (0)

5067 hits

< The Entropyneurs of Widgetworld | Technocrapi counting our links again >

Trackbacks

Trackback specific URI for this entry

No Trackbacks

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

So for people not making a living out of writing blogs and yet still serving content (i.e the majority)then no ads on sites or in blogs is Nivarna.

But for those few who chose to take the time to read everything and then write something on their blog, they deserve a remuneration of sorts.

#1 Sam Sethi (Homepage) on 2007-05-19 08:14 (Reply)

Hi Sam

I think one has to separate the 2 issues of (i) advertising via RSS and (ii) making a living via commercial support of a blog.

Advertising via RSS is (imho of course) unlikely to ever be popular with readers as it is intrusive and unwanted, and thus - like popups - will be avoided.

Irritating the reader is not an option medium term - bear in mind that without the reader, the Ad is useless.

I'm afraid that promoters of RSS Ads (and widgets) will just have to "get real" about this and find other ways to monetise - this one is just not going to fly medium term (again, in my view).

The point Valleywag makes imho points to a potential answer - analytics - and the blog writer and advertiser can share the benefit there without annoying the reader.

#2 alan p on 2007-05-19 09:30 (Reply)

Advertising doesn't have to be intrusive. That's why Google text ads are "nicer" than pop-ups. Plus, this is the kind of argument people used in 1995 when 'old hands' started complainign that people used too many lines in their signature, thus eating bandwidth. RSS ads are here to stay because the growth is in RSS reading not in page impressions. The question is HOW you do it that works for everyone. However, I'd also agree with Valleywag's points.

#3 Mike (Homepage) on 2007-05-29 09:37 (Reply)

Mike....I think my view would be that the monetising parties desperately want Ads to be part of RSS, but that ultimately it's the users who will determine the success or failure - if RSS Ads turn the users off, it will be the death knell.

#4 alan p on 2007-05-29 12:19 (Reply)

Users probably won't turn of RSS feeds that don't ABUSE them with ads. The sites/feeds that use ads appropriately will be just fine, just like on the Web. Most RSS readers today are techies, and tetchy audience at best. The coming masses are well used to ads with everything.

#5 Mike (Homepage) on 2007-05-29 12:55 (Reply)

Hi Mike...I'm a tetchy techie I guess

Yes, I'd probably agree that most users will let it ride for a while if there is no abuse - but I suspect that realistically, asking the Ad industry to moderate its abuse will be hard - there is always someone who will push it too far.

Add to that the opportunity to spam (spam is up to 90% of all emails carried today) and I suspect that there will be abuse.

The thing is this - do you see RSS as a transport mechanism or part of the "presentation layer". I see it as part of the Transport layer and thus want it to be as clean a tech as possible.

Thus I think Ads in the transport layer are a bad idea, but that is in my opinion of course

#6 alan p on 2007-05-30 07:14 (Reply)

The Transport layer? That's like saying you don't like ads in email newsletters though, surely? And I assume you are used to those by now...

#7 Mike (Homepage) on 2007-05-30 08:54 (Reply)

Re email newsletters - I prefer weblinks, and strip those that are incoming as much as possible - its a security thing as much as a dislike of Ads.

Now granted that may just be me - but dunno if you recall a few years ago when adverts were at the head of emails, or played before you could get webmail - that died pdq.

Re Google / Feedburner - if you look at G's biz model its as much about offering net related services for free as allowing Ads....so imho they would be better off using feedburner as a distribution net and doing the analytics rather than risking user turnoff via Ads.

#8 alan p on 2007-05-30 11:25 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (word), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information? Subscribe to this entry