Do You Know Everything About FeedBurner?
February 23, 2007 |
I had a chance to catch up with FeedBurner employee, Eric Olson. Eric is responsible for cultivating relationships with bloggers, blog networks, podcasters and a wide range of independent and commercial publishers, making him a prime interviewee to look at here at Profy. During our conversation, I found out a little more about the service that so many of us use daily, the reasons behind its success, and the founding principals behind it. To me, the level of customer support, is what I found truly amazing, along with the 21st century down-to-earth approach that the company has. Here's what Eric had to say…
Eric, great to have you here with us on Profy.com. I think everybody here already knows what FeedBurner is, so can you give a little run-down on the basics, just to recap the soul of what you do?
FeedBurner is the leading provider of online media distribution and audience engagement services. Our mission is to provide comprehensive metrics on publishers' content wherever it resides, to help publishers expand their reach, and to make their feeds more accessible to their audience.
Sweet… Now I know that FeedBurner is one of the net's hottest web communities, and last I heard, you had a growth rate exceeding MySpace. That's pretty incredible, don't you think? What do you guys think is the reason behind it?
I definitely think it's pretty incredible, but I may be a bit biased. I think that our success comes from a number of things. First, we strive to make our tools easy to use. The value you get from FeedBurner with such a small amount of set-up time is important.
Second, we are constantly innovating. Whether it's running our quarterly Hackathons (where our developers get together for a whole day and tackle a bunch of new features that can be completed by the end of the day), or simply keeping our eye to the future like we've done with widgets. We're always trying to anticipate what publishers will need next and then we strive to have it ready to go before they even think about it.
Third has to be our customer support. We take each and every one of our 340,000 publisher relationships very seriously and provide the utmost support to everyone. Our e-mail and forums support are always staffed and response times are very quick. We also make sure that we stay in the conversations, so to speak. What I mean by that is we keep up on FeedBurner conversations happening on the Interweb and make sure to jump in and help if there is a problem, and just to say thanks for being such great customers. It's really important to us that we keep in touch with all of our publishers whether they contact us directly or indirectly.
Lastly… well, there are many more things we do to make sure the FeedBurner experience is a good one, so I'll leave it at three for now.
Does FeedBurner have a particular business plan for the foreseeable future, or are you sticking by your philosophy that offering service for free pays off in its own right?
We'll always offer free services and continue to innovate those services, but our business plan is built on our ad network for blogs and feeds. When publishers decide that they have a large enough audience, and we see enough advertising demand for their type of content, we allow them to opt in to the ad network. Once a publisher is in the ad network, they can approve or decline any ad we send them (we're very big on giving publishers full control). If they approve an ad, it can appear in their feeds, on their sites/blogs or in both places. Ads are sold on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) model, so publishers get paid for each impression they serve, and we share a revenue split with them.
I should also note that the business plan includes an “enterprise” level feed management tool for large publishers called FeedFoundry. FeedFoundry is essentially FeedBurner on steroids for those publishers who want to track a large number of feeds potentially across multiple properties. This is helpful for our publishers working with upwards of 50 feeds or so (e.g. Dow Jones, Geffen Records, USA Today).
Can you tell us some more about the general audience that uses FeedBurner? Do you have an average age of a user, for example? What do most people use your service on? Full-blown websites, or blogs?
Sure can – I can tell you without hesitation that FeedBurner has the best customers on the planet! However, we don't track traditional demographic data, since personal info is not required to set up a FeedBurner feed. We work with all types of publishers — from major media brands like Reuters, Wired News and Newsweek — all the way down the tail to personal blogs like mine. In terms of number of publisher on certain platforms, I am sure blogs would win out as can be expected when you work with 340,000 publishers. Of course, 90,000 of the feeds we manage are podcast/video feeds, so there's quite a bit of diversity out there.
Why does FeedBurner do what it does for the community? The fact that if you e-mail in, and you're guaranteed to get a response from a real person as I found out, rather than a robot, or a grumpy helpdesk assistant. Do you think that this builds user trust? I mean, if you offer this with your free services, your paid ones must be exceptional!
We believe in great customer support plain and simple. In the end of the day we're all customers of something and we know what poor support is like. Plus, a lot of us are publishers too—considering we publish our own blogs—which keeps us in tune to what publishers need in terms of support.
I absolutely think that our great support builds user trust. People who use FeedBurner know they can get in touch with a human when they need to – via our Support Forums or by email – and they can get their issue taken care of quickly. This is especially rare in the Internet world, but we didn't think that should be the case for us. Besides, our users make FeedBurner what it is, so we want to make sure we treat them well.
How can people benefit by using your paid services? What's the difference?
FeedBurner has two paid services: MyBrand and TotalStats. MyBrand allows you to use a subdomain of your own URL rather than the default “feeds.feedburner.com” URL we provide. So, for example, you could use “feeds.profy.com” to keep your name brand consistent.
TotalStats allows you to dive deeper into item-level statistics about your content consumption. With TotalStats you can see how many times each item in your feed has been viewed and clicked. Views are tracked by using a 1×1 tracking gif that when opened in a newsreader will render and we'll be able to count a view for you. Clicks are simply clicks on the headline of the item which will bring readers back to your site. Having this information at your fingertips allows you to easily discern what type of content tends to do better in your feed, and what content doesn't generate much of a response so you can continue to improve your content strategy. You can compare TotalStats to our free StandardStats service here.
Well Eric, it's been a pleasure to talk to you today. I hope that all the Profy readers learned something really valuable here, and will give out what FeedBurner has to offer themselves. I for one am seriously considering upgrading my feed to a paid one after that!
