Spliced feed networks with ads

Brad Feld blogged yesterday about a new FeedBurner effort to place ads on more feeds through the creation of aggregated feed networks. A single curator selects a few feed URLs to create a mega feed for a topic or musing. FeedBurner sells targeted ads inside of the aggregated feed and its various forms of syndication — HTML, RSS/Atom, JavaScript widget, etc. — on a CPM basis.

Who other than FeedBurner gets paid for these ad impressions? It seems like another attempt to mine the seemingly free gold laying on the riverbed named user-generated content. The idea isn’t much different than Squidoo, a company donating a percentage of profits to charity to make it seem a bit less like photocopying the work of other writers for profit.

In the literary world there are established means for paying writers for aggregation of work. A network such as FeedBurner could have all publishers opt-in to the possibility of network selection and provide such publishers an approval process for new published channels. Payments could be made on a per-use basis when a page using the content turns a profit. Authors with a Creative Commons By-Attribution license and a valid e-mail address in their feed could receive an opt-in e-mail for channel alerts.

Perhaps it’s best to use a network of venture capitalists as a test group, since they may not notice the pennies dropped in their hats from the crowd passing by, but the network seems like an under-thought launch announcement plan from FeedBurner and its VCs.

2 replies on “Spliced feed networks with ads”

  1. The publishers and FeedBurner share the revenue for any advertising, just like any publisher that currently participates in the FeedBurner Ad Network. There is no difference in the economics for the Venture Capital Network (or any other Network) – as coordinator, I don’t get paid anything extra, however, we end up concentrating traffic and relevance to the advertiser that should result in increased eCPM because of better demographic targeting (both publisher and correspondingly subscriber.)

    In addition, members of a Network are not required to have advertising in their feed – this continues to be entirely at the individual publishers option.

  2. niall, we don’t aggregate anything ourselves. it’s simply a tool to allow publishers to aggregate themselves for multiple reasons, one being in order to enable advertisers to aggregate purchases across a network of properties with self service tools for the publishers and advertisers. No different than anything else we do. We haven’t launched anything yet. We’re just testing things out to see how they work and see what we need to fix and change before we do launch it.

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