Finally Bloglines Realizes It Needs to Make Money

Today there’s a story on ReadWriteWeb about a new look and feel of the Bloglines beta site introduced by the company along with finally making its web-based feed reader ad-supported. True, may of us have already decided that Bloglines has no chances to survive in the competition with Google Reader, the most prominent feed reader as we tend to believe.

To tell you the truth, it was rather a surprise to me to find out that according to Hitwise Bloglines still seems to actually lead the web-based feed reading game - at least for the US users - and maintains its leading position, no matter how certain we may be that Google Reader is actually the most popular feed reader of all. At the same time there’s no doubt that Google Reader is obviously growing - and growing fast - so this situation may very well change in the nearest future. But that will also depend on the quality of service both web-based feed readers offer to their users as well as how efficient Bloglines’ marketing and promotion efforts are.

The new skin is already available to all beta users (though I have personally experienced problems trying to log in both with my Bloglines account and with my OpenID when the first one failed). But from what I’ve seen on the screenshots available, it is quite a good-looking redesign that I believe will be very well received by users.

But since the big news for Bloglines today is the newly introduced advertising, let’s take a closer look at what we should expect in this regard. Bloglines is introducing display advertising today - users will now see ads either in the search results and on the start page. That means that unlike back in 2005 Bloglines is not attempting to introduce any ads right within the content consumed by a reader - in 2005 the company attempted to introduce contextual ads right within the content in feeds but that was a very unpopular decision among publishers so this approach was not pursued, after all.

The company admits to still be trying to understand what monetization model will fit into a feed reader model. I personally believe that display advertising separated from content will hardly work since the majority of users spend much more time actually reading the feeds than on the landing page itself (and how often do we actually search in the feeds compared to reading them?). So in my opinion while contextual ads still may result in controversy, probably a better idea would be to use display ads right within the feeds by showing a banner of suitable size after I scroll through, say, every 100 items in the reader.

But it is a very well-known fact that many users will object to ad-supported model and will start arguing that ads are either distracting or intrusive. So I think the next logical step for Bloglines after introducing ads must be allowing the users to choose if they want a free (and ad-supported) place to read their feeds or if they prefer to pay a small amount per year to stick to their favorite feed reader without watching the ads. And judging by the fact that Bloglines still retains a more than decent market share even when it is rarely hyped in blogs or mainstream media, I believe that Bloglines users are loyal enough not to flee from the service when offered such a choice.