Google & Web 2.0 Jon on 05 Jul 2007 06:24 pm
Feedburner is now completely free…Thanks, Google. Now, where’s my ad?
Google made a splash not too long ago with its purchase of FeedBurner. For those who don’t know, FeedBurner is an online tool that helps people who create feeds (bloggers, podcasters) manage, disseminate and track their feeds. If you have a blog, for example, FeedBurner, helps you see traffic and subscribers for it, make it compatible with various aggregators, optimizes and submits it to major search engines and all sorts of other cool stuff.
The acquisition, of course, is old news (well, June 1st). Today, Feedburner announced that their PRO level accounts are now free. Before now, users could have access to detailed statistic reports (Stats Pro) as well as the “MyBrand” service that allows feed creators to have a customizable address for their feeds (i.e. feeds.overoll.com/myfeed rather than feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed). Read HERE for a view on why the MyBrand feature is rather important. If you’ve been paying the $3-$14 per month until now, you won’t be billed for June so take yourself out for lunch or something…If you haven’t wanted to pony up, you can now activate the new features.
Google, of course, will be looking for more people to sign up and use FeedBurner to help distribute their feeds. In Google’s blog post on this, they remind us that “FeedBurner offers a feed advertising platform for advertisers to reach engaged feed readers through targeted in-feed ads and innovative techniques like RSS feed-driven ads.” Yes, FeedBurner already has a huge advertiser network, doing what you would expect Google to do anyway with AdSense - advertisers can sign up to insert ads into relevant feeds. However you can now look forward to podcasts and RSS feeds showing up as inventory in your Google AdWords content network, and you can tracking it with new features in your Google Analytics account.
For point of reference, FeedBurner has over 430,000 feeds reaching 67 million subscribers per day…that’s a lot of people getting highly targeted content (see HERE). While I’d love to see the breakdown of how those subscribers are broken down, it’s still a nice audience Google can now offer its advertisers.