Google Destroyed Feedburner
I used to see a decent amount of ad dollar revenue via Feedburner. High quality ads, a few grand a month, all of which I plowed back into development. Feedburner essentially paid for the new site redesign.
Then Google took them over, and its been a total clusterf*&k ever since. They replaced a quality ad program with Adsense — and its total shit now. Utterly embarrassingly dreck. How worthless it is? The revenue dropped about 90%. Gee, why aren’t you folks reading TBP clicking on payday loan ads and mortgage broker leads?
Google took a wonderful RSS feeder — and its still an excellent RSS/email feeder — and made it irrelevant. Formerly strewn intelligent, higher end advertising, and completely destroyed it. Customer service is a disaster, the interface blows, Adsense is a pain in the ass — Feedburner has become utterly worthless as an advertising platform. October ads threw off under $500, down 75% from the pre-Google days, despite RSS feeds more than doubling over the past 3 months.
Don’t be evil? How about "Don’t be sucky?"
To give you an idea of how irrelevant the ads served by Adsense are, yesterday, the Big Picture RSS feed had 40,305 Ad Impressions, which generated a grand total of how many Clicks? How about 17, or 0.04%. That’s about what you would get from people accidentally clicking ads when navigating their email. Its just god-awful.
Anyone have any good alternative suggestions for another RSS feed? I am looking for simple RSS, with quality, relevant ads. The RSS traffic is between 25,000 and 30,000.
October 28th, 2008 at 8:45 am
BR,
I think the Rubicon Project may help you! If it works out, email me.
http://rubiconproject.com/
Elvis
October 28th, 2008 at 8:46 am
Oh, quit beating around the bush… what do you think about Adsense?
October 28th, 2008 at 8:48 am
a classic example of feckless Finance severing the thinking head of Economics.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/feckless
October 28th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Oh come now. I’m sure the ads for Lily Allen ringtones are huge income generators for you!…
October 28th, 2008 at 9:00 am
That law of unintended consequences again …. quantity goes up…quality comes down.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Try AdBrite….
There’s another one, a better one, and the name is escaping me…. you need a referral to get in there with them.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:08 am
that’s what i like about BR, he’s not afraid to tell it like it is….warts and all. very refreshing and comical to read. two extra credit points for proper use of the word “dreck”.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:09 am
Why do you need 3rd party RSS, good blogging tools do it. Barry, it’s time to dump typepad and go to Wordpress (the IT geeks use it almost exlusively so it has to be good) – just in time for the upgrade.
Just slap an ad from a good advertiser down the bottom of an article and let it auto syndicate down.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:13 am
There are literally 100s of ad networks out there. As far as I know, none of them have out-of-the-box ad code that inserts units (and probably not IAB standard units in any event) into RSS feeds. Try TribalFusion, BannerSpace, etc.
But really, that’s what you want. You don’t want to switch off Feedburner because you’ll lose a lot of your RSS readers who will not realize they have to switch. You should be agnostic as to how a user gets your RSS feed.
Solution: put the ads directly in the feed itself.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:18 am
Sounds like Google took over Feedburner to deliberately destroy it and remove the competition to Adsense.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:18 am
So….short Google?
October 28th, 2008 at 9:21 am
I agree. What are they doing with feedburner? It sucks now.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:22 am
Try Pheedo. They can insert ads into your feedburner feeds also.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:30 am
…or the guys who paid for the old ads stopped ponying up and got replaced by the cheap schlock.
I can think of a lot of guys who were big advertisers who won’t get any clicks in this market… or shouldn’t be paying much for the ones they get…
October 28th, 2008 at 9:43 am
BR –
As a fellow site publisher I hear your pain. On the other hand, Google did release AdManager in August and it’s a great program for bloggers and sites with decent traffic. You’re probably at the scale now where you can start selling your own CPM based advertising, and letting AdSense just fill in the holes. I directly sell about 80% of my traffic on long term (6 and 12 month ad buys) which net a far higher CPM than AdSense could ever reach — and I let AdSense be the default for whatever unsold inventory I’ve got.
http://google.com/admanager
Good luck and thanks for the great blog.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:44 am
I don’t think they do RSS feeds but you may be able to convince them to work on it or it may be in developement. The group is project wonderful and they have a fantastic advertising concept. I don’t know if they will generate the revenue you are looking for but they could certainly add to it. I’m sensing a potential synergy. You would probably be better for them than they are for you initially but they have earned the recco. You can also place multiple ads through your site which will increase your revenue streams.
I have found their advertisers to be active though you may need to take a more hands on approach. If you want someone to manage the ad side of it for you or you need questions answered I can do. I use them myself for both advertising and publishing and I’m a happy camper
Project Wonderful
October 28th, 2008 at 9:48 am
How many bright young software companies were destroyed by Microsoft in it’s infinite monopolistic wisdom? To bring us Vista?
Time to rejuvenate the antitrust acts and associated regulators!
Seriously, how many lines of business does the U.S. have in which there are no more than 2 serious competitors (totalling 90% of more of market share) in any local market?
Chips: Intel/AMD
Operating Systems: Microsoft / Apple
Productivity Software: Microsoft
Online Search: Google + a couple of yahoos
Soft Drinks: Coke/Pepsi
Two-Way Telecommunication: Your Cable Co & Your Phone Co.
Home Energy: Your local utility
… and so on…
And where we don’t have monopolies or duopolies, we have crony capitalists and their pet politicians currying profit-making favors from Washington.
Sigh.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:55 am
Yahoo
Google does what all monopolies eventually do. I’m sure you’ve read The Octopus.
But seriously, I agree with whomever (not really awake yet) that you shouldn’t change feeds abruptly and fake out your readers.
I don’t know enough about blog sites and feeds to give an informed opinion on it. It does seem like there should be a platform, maybe even one to put on your own domain that will give you stability of your own domain name and control of your own ads while still allowing access to the rss syndications you currently have. This would also protect you from the vagaries of ever-shifting internet business models.
Need more coffee!
October 28th, 2008 at 10:03 am
It would have happened sooner or later anyway. Does anyone really believe all of that ad revenue Google was generating was based on sustainable fundamentals? That people visiting any blog generated a million dollars or more in sales from those ad placements? It was absurdly insane.
The reality is we are(were) in an ad bubble. And, many benefited while it lasted. What you are seeing is less of a function of Google’s destruction of Feedburner and more a function of unsustainable factors. The largest ad spenders are financial firms and auto-related companies. Have you seen how much they have sliced their ad budgets lately? Welcome to the new world.
Google’s bubble has been pricked.
October 28th, 2008 at 10:33 am
hmm… I read via RSS and I can’t recall ever seeing ads in this feed…
October 28th, 2008 at 10:36 am
Buy the competition so as to destroy it?
How very Microsoftian.
October 28th, 2008 at 10:43 am
I read you through Google reader, and about 50% of the time the ad at the bottom has been for Lily Allen Ringtones.
October 28th, 2008 at 10:57 am
alright, i just clicked on an ad just for you.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:06 am
If you make money, how will they.
it’s like you don’t understand the system some times.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Timely blog. Thanks. I’ve signed up for AdSense but haven’t installed it because I think a lot of the clicks generated on financial sites comes from various forms of click fraud. People click on ads on each other’s sites, I’m speculating. Given your traffic of some 541k unique visitors/month, according to quantcast.com, you should be selling ads directly or through some broker who can sell them for you. You’re the 4,200th largest web site internationally, and brokers, mutual fund companies, banks, etc. should be on this site big time. If you have any ad agency contacts, you might want to chat with them about who the big web ad brokers are.
Your rankings at Quantcast.com are here:
http://www.quantcast.com/bigpicture.typepad.com
I hope you update us on what you find out.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:18 am
Further thoughts.
Are there ad sales people who call on your firm seeking to sell web ad space? Ask your PR/Mkting folks or those in other Wall Street firms who the most effective, biggest players are. Then interview them.
The question then becomes, how much of the action will the brokers want. What technology will you need, and what is the hassle factor?
Final thought, do you track the business your blog brings in for Fusion. You’re firm is your best advertiser, I suspect.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:20 am
Google ad revenue can be highly variable too. I get big spikes in traffic on my blog and ad revenue drops. Then can get a spike in revenue on a slow traffic day. Makes no sense.
Your ads are only in RSS, right? Have you thought about putting Google ads on your home page?
You might want to see in Blogads.com would work for you.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Gee, I should be an editor! Left out a ? and used “you’re” instead of “your.” I post before I edit sometime and am used to going back and editing my posts. Sigh!
October 28th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Hi
I have a blog and a Adsense account.
My numbers for the October month were as follows:
Page impressions:4,225
Clicks: 24
Page CTR 0.57%
Page eCTM $0.79
Earnings: $3.33
Can anyone expalin me the significance of these numbers?
October 28th, 2008 at 11:32 am
I agree with you ….
Lets get all financial bloggers to unite and start our own
October 28th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Wow, this site has ads? huh.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:49 am
I’ve seen sites with ads embedded into the RSS feed, those are tolerable. I’ve also seen sites with dedicated RSS feed for ads (eetimes.com, approximately 1/5th of their RSS posting is ads), and those suck. So go with the former if possible.
I’ve emailed a couple of friends at google, some working in the advertising department, see what they say…
October 28th, 2008 at 11:57 am
Dude. Just because they’re pushing ads doesn’t mean your viewers are seeing them. Maybe your problem is that by now, for one reason or another, everyone has google ads filtered? I certainly do.
Not that you lost any clicks from me due to the switch- I don’t let my RSS reader serve any ads at all. But if lots of people are using firefox/sage or whatever to read your RSS, or even worse, using Google’s own feed reader, they probably have ad filtering turned on in their browsers.
I’m guessing that it’s not so much that people aren’t clicking on the ads they see, it’s that they don’t see any ads.
October 28th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I’m surprised that TSCM doesn’t sell ads for its ex-columnists turned bloggers. You, Merkel, Kedrosky, Then your blogs could have tabs on TSCM/RM and you’d get even more clicks….I suppose while I’m at this game, TSCM should be rolled up by CNBC…
October 28th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
I approached someone at TSCM with the idea 2 years ago — it never went anywhere.
October 28th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Google’s (figurative) stock has been going down in my eyes for the last couple years. They seem to be following the same pattern as most successful internet startups:
1. Start with some hot new philosophy and make a lot of money.
2. Hire a bunch of decrepit old executives from a stale company / industry.
3. Watch the hot new philosophy slowly turn to shit.
Google used to be simple and functional. Now I think they are just cramming a bunch of crap down our throats and, like Microsoft, are telling us: “This is better, we don’t care if you like it or not, this is better, trust us, it’s better.”
I hate it that their gmail doesn’t use folders (trust us, searching random shit is better), I hate their new iGoogle setup, where they 10-20% of my screen is now dead space so that they can show their cool, new “Tabbed Screen” technology (that was so Firefox so several years ago). Their online apps are slow, clunky, and feature free, especially compared to their competitors, and their ad selections don’t make any sense. If their algorithms are so ingenious, why are most of my ads about paycheck loans and penis enlargement? That is the same shit I was getting before the Google advertising revolution.
The Google bloat and calcification has begun. I am glad their employees get free salad bars, but I am slowly walking away from their services. A competitor is needed, and I will support it.
October 28th, 2008 at 2:49 pm
You should look into Pajamas Media.
http://pajamasmedia.com/
Formed by bloggers, run by & for bloggers. Roger Simon is the CEO. Instapundit is part of Pajamas Media now.
October 28th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
No offense to Tuck, but stay away from Pajamas Media.
They have carved out a political niche, and as such, your being there will disincline a portion of your potential readers.
October 28th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Forgot my disclosure statement:
I disagree with the political bent of Pajamas Media.
I’m not saying that I would not go there if you went there, but if I had come across your blog there, I would not be significantly less inclined to read it regularly.