FeedBurner Ad Leader On What Google Deal Means

by Gavin O'Malley, Friday, Jun 8, 2007 6:00 AM ET
WITH THE ACQUISITION OF FEEDBURNER last week, Google secured a wealth of media syndication analytics, and access to a distribution channel with latent ad opportunities.
Besides a rumored $100 million, RSS technology company FeedBurner is guaranteed loads of extra consumer and publisher data, along with new strategies for monetizing and optimizing its delivery systems, according to Brent Hill, vice president of advertising services at FeedBurner.
"From the advertising side, there's a lot of room ahead in terms of monetization and optimization, which Google is going to expose us to," Hill said during a conversation with OnlineMediaDaily on Thursday. "We'll be learning how to incorporate their analytics and monetization strategies for advertisers."
Much remains to be learned about RSS users and their consumption habits, according to Hill.
"The way to understand demographics has been to work with publishers, survey their audiences, and try to get representative sample sizes," he said. "Google does some of the same things around AdSense content, so we'll be able to combine our information and make progress faster."
In addition, Google has strong relationships with online retailers--a group critical to the next phase of growth for FeedBurner and the RSS industry at large, said Hill.
"Google is going to help speed up retailer adoption of RSS as a marketing tool because of its connection with the retailer community, which is obviously a gigantic category around paid search and AdSense," he explained.
"To the extent that Google's client-serving teams can understand more about what can be done with feeds, I think we can just roll that out and get it into the hands of sales teams and get it out to retailers more quickly," Hill added.
FeedBurner has serviced nearly 432,000 publishers worldwide, according to Dick Costolo, FeedBurner CEO and co-founder. Additionally, the company is delivering 67 million subscriptions per day and counting.
In addition to independent bloggers and podcasters, FeedBurner is a major distributor of RSS feeds for publishers such as Reuters and USA Today as well as retailers and travel companies offering feeds about their latest deals.