FeedBurner and you – an interview with Steve Olechowski

[What follows is one of the interviews I did for Chapter 8, Power Tools for Bloggers, for my book, Clear Blogging: How People Blogging Are Changing the World and How You Can Join Them.]

Steve Olechowski is the Chief Operating Officer and a cofounder of FeedBurner, Inc. Back in the glory days of the dot-com boom, Steve, along with Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, and Matt Shobe, built an SMS text notification service called Spyonit. They sold that service in September 2000, as the four online entrepreneurs moved onto the next technological development: RSS feeds.

Today, FeedBurner is the must-have tools for bloggers who want to make it as easy as possible for their readers to enjoy their postings via RSS.

Q. So what are you trying to accomplish with FeedBurner?

A. Well, we're trying to make it really easy for publishers to do a number of things with their feeds. Number one is we're trying to make it easy for bloggers to make their content subscribable. We think the model is going to change over the next year or so. In the past, content was reached primarily through search results or bookmarks. We think in the future there's going to be a third component to that: people subscribing to content in many different ways. The whole reason we started FeedBurner is that we thought that content delivery would evolve through the subscription channel via RSS.

Once your content is subscribable, you have to start to build awareness around the content so people know that your feed is there. As people start to get your feed, either from your website or blog or repackaged by someone else, you want to start tracking who is getting your feed. FeedBurner makes it easy for publishers to track their subscribers, analyze their reader preferences, and figure out exactly how people are getting to their content.

The fourth thing that FeedBurner does is one of those things that became apparent to us as we were providing these other publishing services: Publishers were going to want to monetize this delivery channel. Depending on the model the publisher is using, it may make sense to monetize their feed through advertising, because if they are consuming content via the feed, a logical conclusion is that they won't be coming back to the site as often.

Advertising in RSS

Q. Are you finding that the consumers of feeds are accepting or hostile to having advertising in their feed?

A. I can tell you in general we see subscribership continuing to increase across the board as publishers start to put advertising in their feeds. A part of what goes along with that is that it's done the right way. It's done in a way that's not intrusive. It's value-added to the content; it's not done in an obnoxious way. We've found a way to marry content to advertising in a very nonintrusive way. Currently, we are putting it at the end of the content. By doing so, we've found that the response has been very good.

Q. So it doesn't trigger the immune system most people have when it comes to advertising?

A. No more than any other form of advertising.

Q. There are the screaming car ads on television and there are the Google AdSense ads that maybe you care, maybe you don't— they don't yell in your face. They're pretty innocuous. So you're looking to do the same thing with RSS feeds?

A. Yeah, but we always leave that decision [to advertise] up to the publisher; we just provide the tools.

Q. Is there some rough yardstick of if I have X subscribers, I'll make Y a month if I advertise?

A. I don't think we have that kind of statistic available yet. It's still the early days and it varies all over the place.

Q. Can you give me some idea for the people who are interested in making money from their blogs what kind of money we are talking about?

A. We think that the way we are doing advertising is roughly equivalent to other online channels as well. We look at it from a CPM [cost per thousand ad impressions] of $7 to $10, but it's changing all the time. It's the early days, and it's a rapidly evolving market.

Q. Are the ads derived from one of the big online ad networks, like Google AdSense?

A. We let publishers choose from all sorts of different sources of where the ads come from. One of the important things to realize about RSS advertising is that it's not search marketing. In search advertising, the ads are meant to perform when there's a search, and it's delivering the results, and people are in that mode of searching, buying, doing something. RSS reading is a much different mode. These are long-term readers of your content. These are people seeing your content every day, and they're not arriving via search. So instead of looking to buy something at the point they are reading this—though they may if it your content is a product review—what we're finding is that the types of campaigns that are working much better right now are brand-awareness and brand-marketing campaigns, because they are targeted to the demographics of the people reading the feeds.

The important metric here is we can tell an advertiser that this ad will get in front of this many eyeballs in a day, because the publisher has this number of subscribers, and they publish this many items a day.

Q. Let's say you had a feed for general contractors who build houses. Would you see ads from companies who sell plumbing fixtures? In other words, brand awareness within appropriate content?

A. That's a good example, I guess.

What Bloggers and Podcasters Want

Q. What are you finding is the most popular service you offer, as far as bloggers?

A. For people using Blogger.com—we have a lot of Blogger.com users—on the Optimize tab [of our site], there are a few things I'd like to mention. Our most popular service is BrowserFriendly. What this does is it puts a style sheet on your feed, so when someone comes across the orange subscribe icon, and they click on it, it doesn't give you raw XML. We found when publishers implement this, their subscriptions start to increase dramatically.

One of the things that's specific to Blogger.com is they only publish their feeds in a format called Atom [Author's Note: As of December 2006, Blogger.com has a new version in public beta that supported RSS 2.0 as well as Atom 1.0.]. But there are actually nine different standards of RSS and two different standards of Atom. Of the 2,000 different RSS readers and aggregators we see out there, a number of these things don't necessary process all nine formats of RSS and many don't support Atom. So one of the things a publisher can do at our service is activate SmartFeed, which will automatically make their feed compatible with every RSS reader and aggregator out there.

Q. So this is a way to get everybody speaking the same feed language?

A. Yes. There are actually over 2,000 different readers and aggregators we see, and the number is growing every day.

Q. What else do you offer specifically to bloggers and podcasters?

A. I'd say the service that is most popular with our podcasters is the SmartCast service. What this service does is allows you to use the existing blogging tools out there, like Blogger, and even though they don't natively support podcasting, by running their feed through our service, we do allow them to be able to deliver a podcast. As long as they are putting links in their content, and running it through our SmartCast service, we'll make the feed compatible with the different podcast points out there like iTunes.

Podcasts Made Easy

Q. So basically what you're doing there is you're making a whole bunch of plumbing go away.

A. Exactly. You, as a podcaster, don't have to worry about how to configure your feed template or your blogging engine. It's another thing we've made very easy. Another thing we do along with that is that the different podcasting directories, they want different information passed to them, along with the feed.

For instance, the iTunes directory wants where should it show up in their catalog, and other specialized things that some of the other podcasting clients don't necessarily care about or use. So one of the things we do is we'll help you, the publisher, put the necessary information in to make it compatible with iTunes, add it to Yahoo! Search, and include Media RSS information, and some other things that are coming down the pike will start appearing here [the SmartCast tab at FeedBurner] as well.

There are going to be more and more of these proprietary extensions, because face it, these media companies are competitors and don't want to use each others standards.

More on the way

Q. What would be the next thing you offer that would improve the value for those reading blogs via RSS readers?

A. The thing we are most excited about, that is probably our fastest growing thing, is our FeedFlare service on the Optimize tab. And we just launched this a few weeks ago. It allows you to publish a number of actions along with your feed. So typically today, reading RSS has been a very passive experience. What we are trying to do is turn it into a more active experience. So when your reader base is reading your feed on a daily basis, you want to allow them to interact with your content and do other things, such as post it to del.icio.us, or e-mail it to a friend, or blog this. So those are some of the things we are enabling with this FeedFlare service. It allows the reader to act on the content beyond just reading it and going away.

One of the things we are going to be doing in the next few months is really opening up the API [Application Programming Interface] around this so that the developer community can create a number of extensions for the FeedFlare service.

Q. What do you see people doing with these actions?

We see how you can contact via e-mail the author immediately. We see things like Skype  being a part of this—just other ways of making that conversation more active. We have a whole laundry list of ideas we haven't necessarily released yet, but we can't imagine all the ways it's going to be used, so that's why we're opening up the APIs to developers. [Author's note: Skype is an Internet telephone and video service that lets two or more members of the service talk and see each other for free, and converse with their non-Skype international friends for rates far less than conventional international telephone rates. Find more information at http://skype.com.]

FeedBurner for Business Bloggers

Q. We've been talking about individual bloggers and podcasters. What can FeedBurner do for a business that wants to blog?

A. It's using all the tools we've talked about already to build their business.

Q. Do you recommend they set up a different feed for each of the channels (like technical support, sales, etc.) they want to be talking to?

A. If the site is small, it doesn't make sense to have ten different channels. But there's certainly the case that if you have different audiences, say new people you're trying to attract versus customer support-type thing, then it makes sense to separate those. But we try to steer publishers today towards fewer channels, more content, than towards more channels, less content. But it certainly makes sense to separate your content if people are unsubscribing because they're not interested.

Q. Let's say you had a company with three different products and they were blogging about X on Mondays, Y on Wednesdays, and Z on Fridays. Can you set FeedBurner up in a way that routes the right post to the right feed?

A. It might sound like a cop out, but it depends. You might want to cross-sell those products; there's an argument to be made for meshing those posts. If you sell guns and butter, you might want to keep them apart. However, if you want to sell butter to those people who have guns, you might want to start moving pieces of content from one place to the other.

I think one of the things we'll see over the next year is the ability to more easily do that with feeds, so say publish two separate feeds or publish to a combined feed. But that's going to take a little evolution of the feed model and the consumption model.

Q. Any advice for bloggers regarding feeds in general?

A. They should be an important part of any blogger's strategy. I think bloggers will be especially surprised by how many people are subscribing to their feeds, once they use FeedBurner to get very detailed statistics on that.