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Issues With Feedburner Ad Network
Feedburner has launched a self-management tool for advertisers to purchase RSS ads in the Feedburner ad network. This is a big deal, since Feedburner has become an indispensable tool for many bloggers and podcasters. Let me start off by saying I'm a HUGE fan of Feedburner. I use them to manage this blog feed, as well as the feed for my podcast.
However, I've got some serious issues with the way they've rolled out the Feedburner ad network. Here are a few points of contention:
- Select a Category, Not a Site
This is the same issue many advertisers had with contextual ad networks like Google's AdSense. There was no way to specify the exact sites you wanted to run on. I think this is a big mistake on Feedburner's part. Right now, Feedburner is merely letting you select very high level "categories." Blog advertising through places like AdBrite and BlogAds let you choose the specific sites you want to run on. Feedburner should do the same. - CPM Model? No Way.
When I saw this on Feedburner's site, I immediately hit the floor and start rolling around on the ground laughing, snorting uncontrollably. Come on Feedburner... RSS advertising is certainly having trouble gaining traction with advertisers, and a CPM model is going to make it even more difficult. Their lack of real site targeting makes this idea even more ridiculous. Not only am I rolling the dice on the feeds my ad will run in, but they want me to pay a $5.00 CPM?
CPC is the way to go in the space. Advertisers are used to CPC in ad formats that essentially are text links. My understanding is that Yahoo's RSS ad testing was on a CPC, and Feedburner is not going to be able to be competitive with a CPM model. Ridiculous.
I have a lot of faith in RSS advertising, but as the Feedburner ad network stands, I wouldn't be able to recommend it to my clients. I don't think they should be paying on a CPM basis, and I think they should be able to select the sites they run ads with. These aren't outrageous demands.
Read more about the Feedburner ad network at the official Feedburner blog. Link via AdJab.
Update: Dick from Feedburner left a great comment responding to these issues, including addressing plans to roll out site targeting, as well as some of the issues surrounding CPC models. Check out his response in the comments section. PS - I didn't actually roll around on the floor laughing... we have this weird indoor/outdoor carpeting in the office and it frankly wouldn't be that comfortable.
Posted on April 26, 2006 | Permalink
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Comments
Hi there, we love it when our posts make people laugh although in this case we will make an exception! :)
This is the beginning of a great conversation and there is a lot to say to both your points, but we'll keep it short here and write up a more elaborate piece on this whole topic. Ok, site targeting: we will absolutely be rolling out site targeting (and a lot more) for those publishers that want to enable it. We provide ad network services to all sorts of publishers, many of whom cannot have a third party network providing direct access to their properties. So, this is coming but unlike networks that don't serve properties with their own ad sales teams, it has to be based on publisher choice. Secondly, larger advertisers would prefer in many cases to have audience aggregated according to variables and not have to cherry pick individual titles, but this is a moot point as we will be rolling out an option for this for those who want it. We absolutely understand the need.
To your much more direct second point, after two years of testing ads for feeds, we generally think CPC is less preferable for advertisers, publishers, and subscribers in feeds. Subscribers pay too much because EVEN if you filter all the click bots, there are a host of readers and aggregators that will occasionally "auto-click" links in feeds in order to do link analysis. We auto-filter out clicks from hundreds/thousands of click bots , many of which are unique to feeds, and we manually filter out clicks from the 10-20 valid clients that auto-click....so we believe that self-serve CPC won't really work in feeds until this second piece is fully automated because it would mean that CPC advertisers would overpay and see a "false" sense of high performance. For subscribers, we don't like CPC because it is an "impressions don't matter" market in which the advertiser runs as much inventory as you want and looks for ROI/actions. But feeds are not sites, there are no one-time visitors from links or search visitors who are a CPC advertisers bread and butter. Subscribers are explicitly repeat/constantly paying attention. Awareness campaigns for subscribers perform much better in feeds than the intention-based campaigns that work so well on sites. There are a couple of Huge exceptions to this for which we are building out additional services that we will roll out later this fall. In the end, every advertiser backs into an ROI calculation, regardless of CPC or CPM. It has been our experience to date that we can more readily and automatically maximize ROI on CPM in feeds. Again, there is much more to say on this topic and I generally try to keep my comments shorter than the original post (though I may have miscalculated on this one).
Posted by: Dick | Apr 26, 2006 12:59:08 PM
