Three and a half years ago, Google made what seemed to be a pretty big $100 million acquisition: FeedBurner. You remember that company, right? They’re the ones that dominated RSS management before all of that real time tech came along and rendered it obsolete for many people. Today, Google is putting the real time paddles to FeedBurner’s heart in an attempt to rivive it.
If you visit FeedBurner today, you’ll see a “Try out our NEW (beta) version!” message in the top menu. Clicking on this will take you to the new version. So what’s new? The entire look and feel has been revamped. The new Home screen is loaded up with overview stats and alerts for the sites you run. But the real key, of course, is in the Feeds area. → Read More
Yesterday, we first reported the news that Twitter had hired Adam Bain away from News Corp. to be their new president of revenue. Today, Twitter is confirming the news noting that Bain will be the president of “global revenue”. They’re also confirming the other hire we reported: Brent Hill, Google’s former head of financial services in the Midwest. He’ll be Twitter’s new director of sales for the central (United States) region.
We already talked about why Bain’s hire seems like a good one for Twitter — as President of Fox Audience Network (FAN), he was able to pump money out of the mostly dismal group of digital products at News Corp. Hill’s hiring, meanwhile, follows the hiring earlier this month of Dan Coughlin from Facebook to head sales on the East coast, and Amanda Levy from Yelp to head sales on the West coast. Twitter’s sales team now spans the U.S. → Read More
We had a great interview with Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the Real-Time CrunchUp on Friday. Costolo always gives the audience a few good nuggets of news and handles the more difficult questions with ease. He’s a pro.
After the conference I reviewed some of the backstage footage we shot of Costolo before he went on stage for the formal interview. We ask lots of great questions – about Twitter’s revenue, business model, details of the search deals, chances of getting bought next year, and the lovely bathrooms they have at the office. He manages to entertain the entire TechCrunch editorial staff while revealing absolutely nothing. We even slip in a question about Feedburner (Costolo cofounded the company and sold it to Google in 2007) at the end, but sadly we ran out of tape before he answered.
One thing Costolo does clear up – even though I’ve known him for five years now, I apparently have been mispronouncing his name the whole time.
The video is below: → Read More
Former Google exec and the cofounder/CEO of RSS service Feedburner Dick Costolo is Twitter’s new chief operating officer, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Costolo, who sold Feedburner to Google for $100 million in 2007, left Google in July. We’d heard he was looking to start a new company, but obviously Twitter swooped in and grabbed him.
Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s existing head of operations (and also from Google), will presumably remain with the company and report to Costolo.
Steve Gillmor is going to love this, of course, since he proclaimed that RSS was dead and Twitter was the new messaging protocol bus, or something to that effect. “Rest In Peace, RSS,” he wrote, saying “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.” → Read More
Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a million daily RSS readers, now is a good time for a new update.
In June 2006 Firefox, Bloglines and Newsgator were the three largest readers, in that order. Feedburner did an analysis later in 2006 with similar results. Long ago Google reader eclipsed all of those readers. And recently, Outlook has surged as the feed reader of choice.
Of our roughly 1.4 million RSS readers, 520,000, or about 38%, come from Outlook. 390,000, or about 28%, come from Google Reader. Newsgator and BlogRovR are next with about 10% each, followed by Netvibes, Bloglines, AOL, Flock, Yahoo and the Windows Media Center.
The complete breakdown is below. → Read More
After more than two months of testing, Google has finally turned on AdSense for Feeds. Formerly, these were FeedBurner ads. The acquired company has moved its advertising program over to Google’s system, and now any AdSense advertiser can tap into the Feedburner network. The ads are contextual and come in different sizes and formats. Google Operating System, which noticed that the service is now turned on, reports: The new AdSense for Feeds option lets you create a new ad unit that has a format automatically selected from 468×60 and 300×250. . . . You can choose if you want image ads, the ad frequency, the position (top or bottom of the post), the colors and a channel that tracks the ad performance. Hopefully, this will turbocharge ads in feeds, which have not been a stellar performer so far. Does anybody click on those ads? Maybe they should be seen more as branding opportunity, because you certainly see them when you are scrolling through your blog and news feeds. → Read More
Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo. It is hardly surprising that FeedBurner’s subscriber numbers can be faked. What is surprising is how easy it is to do so. As the video above shows, all you need is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their Netvibes page. The result was 2,500 widgets of the blog feed, which FeedBurner counts as separate subscribers. Why does this matter? Blogs like to tout how many RSS subscribers they have because, even if it is a smaller number than direct visitors to their site, it represents their most loyal readers. That’s why we display how many RSS readers we have in the Feedburner chicklet at the top of TechCrunch (currently 850,000). For these numbers to have any meaning, though, they cannot be as easy to game as the video shows. (And, no, we don’t game our numbers). You’d think that Google would be smart enough not to double-count these things, or at least ask Netvibes and other widget start pages to de-duplicate the numbers for them by user. What appears to be happening here is that FeedBurner counts each widget for a particular feed on Netvibes as a separate subscriber, regardless of whether that widget is on ten thousand different user pages or repeated ten thousand times on the same page. The same thing happened a couple years ago with Pageflakes. Update: Netvibes VP of Product Development Franck Mahon responds in comments that it is working to fix the problem of duplicates, but that there are other ways to “hack the numbers.” And he notes that it might be more useful to count active subscribers than just people who may have added a feed two years ago and never read it. CrunchBase Information FeedBurner Netvibes Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Over a year has passed since Google completed the acquisition of feed massaging and hosting service Feedburner, and today some users now finally have their feeds hosted on what appears to be Google’s servers and infrastructure. At Techcrunch we have always been big fans of Feedburner, and their widgets and RSS subscriber counts have adorned almost all of our sites since their first days. At some point in the past 12 hours, the feed URL at feeds.feedburner.com began to redirect to feedproxy.google.com. Our subscriber count widget dropped to displaying a zero count for a few hours while the domain change took place. It appears that only select feeds have been migrated, mostly those with higher subscriber counts. This would indicate that Feedburner has turned to Google to assist with serving the load on high-traffic feeds. Over at TechcrunchIT I recently wrote about the problems that some acquired companies have experienced at Google. The proprietary software and hosting stack at Google can often lead to a slowdown in development, an often long migration phase and in some cases death for the acquired company or product. Feedburner has avoided these problems by remaining largely independent of Google since the acquisition, but at some point they have turned to pappa bear for assistance with handling load and we are seeing the results of that today. CrunchBase Information Google FeedBurner Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Nearly a year after it was bought by Google for $100 million, FeedBurner is finally going to roll out Google’s AdSense as an advertising option for blogs and Websites that use its service to publish their feeds. FeedBurner will start with a few select publishers next week, and then expand the option to all of its customers soon afterwards. What took them so long? That seemed to be the whole point of the acquisition. FeedBurner intersperses ads in blog feeds between every few posts. Integrating with AdSense will allow for publishers to tap into contextual ads for their feeds, in addition to the ads that FeedBurner already sells. Hopefully, Google also found the time to integrate its automated back-end payment system into all FeedBurner accounts. Until recently, FeedBurner was still sends out paper checks to publishers participating in its ad network. At least, that’s how TechCrunch gets paid. CrunchBase Information FeedBurner Google Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
It’s always fun to get the monthly Feedburner check for advertising they insert into the RSS feed. The actual dollar amount is still next to nothing, but I love the fact that, even with nearly 800,000 publishers, 1.4 million managed feeds, and a $100 million payday from Google, they still haven’t automated the check writing process. Someone hand writes all of these checks every month. By the way, there’s been a bit of a stir caused by reports yesterday that Feedburner turned off historical stats. CEO Dick Costolo said via email that it was just a bug caused by a code update, and it will be fixed shortly. CrunchBase Information FeedBurner Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
1,511,000: the number of subscribed RSS readers of TechCrunch, according to the Feedburner Widget as I type this post. Given the number is up significantly from the 600,000 odd subscribers we had yesterday, I’m calling it a Feedburner bug. Feedburner has had a long history of doing strange things with the subscriber counter, and TechCrunch’s readership (if the counter is to be believed) can fluctuate by over 50,000 readers from day to day, but I’ve never seen a 900,000 jump. If you’ve just gained (or even lost) an extra hundred thousand readers, or perhaps even a million, let us know in the comments. Update (MA): Occam’s Razor; Feedburner’s CEO Dick Costolo has confirmed it was a bug and that it will be fixed shortly. → Read More
FeedBurner has ceased charging for two premium features following their acquisition by Google in May. FeedBurner Stats PRO, a service that provides detailed statistics including subscriber numbers, item clickthrough tracking, podcast downloads and aggregate item uses amongst other features, becomes free. FeedBurner MyBrand, a service that allows users to control the URL of feeds is now free as well; a move that will be strongly welcomed. For many, the biggest argument against using Feedburner was the need to give up control of your feed URL (for example, http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch). Being able to keep ownership of a feed complete with site branding will drive new many new users to Feedburner, including yours truly. FeedBurner PRO and MyBrand accounts will not be billed effective from June. Although the services are now free, Feedburner users are required to “upgrade” to them from within the Feedburner control panel. (via SEL) → Read More
Google announced the acquisition of Feedburner today on their corporate blog. Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo confirms it as well on the Feedburner blog. The are not disclosing the price, but our source said it was around $100 million when we wrote about the deal last week, and we still believe that figure is accurate. Google doesn’t go into a lot of detail on why they bought the company, but they do say they are constantly looking for ways to “identify and offer new tools for content creators and website publishers” and “give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users.” That tells me one thing: look for the option to include Adwords in your feed sometime very soon. Feedburner already sells adds into feeds on a CPM basis. Google’s going to crank this up. → Read More
Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years. The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point. Huge congratulations to Feedburner. The company was founded in 2003 and has raised just $10 million in capital over two rounds. Portage Ventures funded their $1 million Series A round in 2004. The $9 million Series B round was closed in mid 2005 (second close in 2006), from Mobius Venture Capital and Union Square Ventures. CrunchBase Information FeedBurner Google Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
RSS management megavendor FeedBurner released an interesting report this morning about the relative market shares of the various leading RSS reader vendors. The statistics go beyond mere subscription numbers and focus on what FeedBurner says is more important – reader engagement. That engagement is measured in two ways, the number of times the feed’s items are loaded and displayed in the reader (called views) and the number of times a feed’s link is clicked through (called clicks). TechCrunch, for example, may now have almost 300,000 people subscribed to its feed who log on to their feed reader in a given day – but only a portion of those people view the TechCrunch feed in particular on a given day. I know I’m subscribed to many feeds that I almost never actually read, FeedBurner’s engagement metrics try to parse that behavior out from active readership. The winning vendors in reader engagement are interesting but so are the larger implications of the numbers being reported. Full details and discussion below the fold (for those not viewing this in a feed reader, that is!) The moral of the story is that Google Reader has come out of nowhere and stolen the hearts of active RSS users. → Read More
Feedburner is testing a new product called “Networks” which are groups of blogs on a single topic that are using Feedburner to manage their RSS feed. The idea is to allow people to subscribe to a single mashed up feed containing all of the content from all of the blogs in that category. See this feed for the venture capital group as an example (which, by the way, I just subscribed to), which lists all of the posts from every blog in the network. Feedburner has been silent on this, but two of their investors, Brad Feld from Mobius Venture Capital and Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, blogged about it. In his post Brad says Feedburner is testing a few networks, and Fred suggests sewing, garage music and scuba diving as examples of possible topice. There are currently 17 feeds included in the VC network, listed here. The goal from a publishers perspective is to gain readers (and I assume a subscriber to the network counts in each of their individual feed counts), as well as advertising revenue, which Feedburner is now selling into feeds at reasonable CPMs (but, as I know from experience, very low sell through rates). The page linked above also lists total subscribers on those blogs. It’s not clear if they are double counting duplicate subscribers across multiple blogs or not. The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic. It isn’t clear if there will be any real quality control – in his post Brad says each network will have a gatekeeper to make sure only blogs on topic are included, but there doesn’t appear to be any hurdle as to what constitutes a quality blog in a topic. That could work out badly. And if the bloggers and/or the network coordinator are making subjective decisions on which blogs can be included in a given network, this will end in tears. The politics around who’s in and who’s out of a blog network are impossible. I know this from personal experience. Our previous posts on Feedburner are here. → Read More
Chicago-based RSS management company Feedburner is announcing the acquisition of Blogbeat on Monday. The deal will allow Feedburner to expand its reach with customers beyond RSS management. Details as Feedburner.com/blogbeat. We profiled Blogbeat in February. It is a blog analytics service similar to Measure Map (which was itself acquired by Google in February 2006). In a phone conversation last night, Steve Olechowski, Feedburner’s COO, said that they have been looking to build or buy a web analytics product to complement their existing RSS analytics tools. Steve expects full integration of the Blogbeat service with Feedburner by Q4 of this year. At that point Feedburner customers will have the ability to see web and RSS statistics for their blogs in a single dashboard. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Blogbeat’s founder, Jeff Turner, has joined Feedburner and will run the web analytics group. → Read More
Feedburner and TypePad will announce a partnership on Thursday that will allow TypePad users to automatically redirect their existing TypePad RSS feed into Feedburner. Until now, if a TypePad user wanted to transfer RSS subscribers to a Feedburner RSS feed (and take advantage of Feedburner stats for those subscribers), each subscriber to the old feed would be required to change their subscription to the new feed. Since subscribers have little incentive to do this, many Feedburner publishers end up managing multiple RSS feeds over time. This partnership will save them the hassle of doing that. Look for more partnerships like this from Feedburner over time. Details on the partnership are here. → Read More
