FeedBurner Dodges the Question

Pete at Mashable sat down with Steve Olechowski, one of the original founders of Feedburner and current Business Product Manager at Google’s AdSense, in order to answer the many questions that the blogosphere has about what the heck is happening with Feedburner.

The interview was lengthy, and Pete asked a lot of questions, but I was left with a few unanswered by the end of it.  One response in particular did catch my attention:

Q: Will there be a method to sell RSS ads direct from your website (assuming the user has an AdWords account)?

A: We have noticed in our time working with advertisers that they don’t necessarily want to buy sites in an ad network one at a time by visiting the site directly. If they visit your site and want to place a large buy, they more likely would contact you directly to place the buy with your sales team.

Likewise, if they have a lot of money to spend and want to buy on your site and on other similar sites, they will likely go directly to the network and see what other similar inventory is available so they can widen their reach as much as possible. What many advertisers oftentimes want to do, however, is buy an audience, and be able to easily find that audience across any number of relevant sites.

We make that process efficient and scalable by making it easy to buy both publisher-sold ad inventory through Google Ad Manager and DART for Publishers, as well as publisher backfill inventory through AdSense. In short, we can help advertisers find an audience online across any number of sites and deliver their messages efficiently and at prices they control to make sure they are getting the best possible ROI.

So, if I’m reading here correctly, the answer to this question is “no, not really.”

Which, once again, leaves us in the unenviable position as bloggers of having no way to very easily monetize our feeds. Sure, you can slap AdSense for Feeds in there, and maybe you’ll get lucky and someone will do a big ad buy in your category.

More than likely, though, you’re going to get about three pennies for every ten or twenty thousand views on your content.

Sponsorships? What about the ability to manage your own CPA ads? None of that? 

If this was just plain AdSense for parked domains, I could understand the inability to treat a site as if it were a property one would want to sell against. Blogs, though, tend to be niche properties, or at least properties with clearly defined demographics. As an author, i know who my audience is, and that’s something I could package to advertisers. 

Unfortunately, for me to do so requires I set up an additional feed management system behind or in front of Feedburner…

… which leads me to the question a lot of folks have been asking lately: “What do I need them for again?”