On Friday Rojo will be officially releasing Feedshare, a new way for blogs to promote themselves on other blogs. The service is available now to test.
The idea is that a blog include a Google Adsense-type ad unit on the site (I’ve included this in the bottom left sidebar of TechCrunch). Two ads are served in the unit and there are vertical and horizontal ad units to choose from. For ever two ads served, the publishing blog gets an impression on another blog.
FeedShare is a service that helps bloggers with similar interests promote each other. As a blogger participant you give exposure on your site to other blogs in the network, and in return your blog will be promoted on similar sites in the network.
You give exposure by displaying “Feed Listings” (see examples) which display the name and description of blogs and other feed publishers. When visitors click on these listings they can then subscribe to the RSS or Atom feed for that blogger or publisher in any one of several feed readers.
You then create a listing for your OWN blog and for every impression you donate to the network on your blog, you will receive a listing on someone else’s blog or in Rojo.com. The goal is to help build the feed subscriber base to your blog, increasing awareness and traffic to your site.
Rojo plans to sell the second ad to third parties, first on a cost-per-impression basis. Later they may experiment with cost-per-click and cost-per-subscirber models as well.
Tags can be set by the blog publisher to control the types of ads shown on the site, as well as what types of sites your ads will be shown on.
Ads link back to Rojo and are recommended for subscription to Rojo or other feed readers. A discussion forum for Feedshare is here.
It would be cooler if the link went directly to the site it was promoting, and not to Rojo.
Yeah I’m in agreement with Ted. Additionally one of their sponsors is weatherbug. An application known to be an adware program.
That is seriously the worst logo I’ve ever seen.
I know it’s a “requirement” to utilize a small team for the development of a Web 2.0 company/service, but small doesn’t mean hiring a 3 year old to create your logo. Spend $100 and get a 13 year old at least.
Their website also doesn’t align correctly in Safari.
Ugh. Sure hope the appearance is editable beyond choosing vertical/horizontal — can’t really tell from the Rojo site.
To Ted’s point: the concept here is to help bloggers generate subscribers to their feeds (in Rojo or other feed readers), and therefore ideally return visitors, rather than one-time click-throughs. But we’ll think about ways to help drive more traffic to participating sites.
Re: Safari, we are working on it.
Re: Logo — send us a better one. If we like it …
Re: reddo (published while I was writing my other response). For this beta trial this is it, but one of the points of feedback we are looking for is what kinds of formats and styling controls people want.
Oh good. LinkExchange is back.
The concept sounds good.. instead of just spreading +rojo buttons to make people subscribe to feeds on rojo people may click on the links if they gets curious about the topic..
but with a habit of adsence people may get annoyed when they are not taken to the topic directly…
a direct link to the topic from the title along with a +rojo would be even better…
Interesting, as someone posted before, pretty much like BannerExchange without going to the sites.
Posted this in my site, but even after many impressions on “Share Your Space”, my “Promote Your Feeds” show the listing as Inactive. Hope there’s no lengthy manual approval process in this…
I created something like this called LinkLike:
http://linklike.com/
It uses graphic ads instead of text. From the site:
“LinkLike is a social networking web site for folks who run web sites. Its metered ad exchange service lets you trade eyeballs with your partners, boosting unique visitors.
Metered means that for every user you send to their site, they must send a user to your site. (If your partner falls behind, then our ad server simply stops showing his ad on your site until he catches up.)”
Michael Randall beat me to it. I was thinking “This sure seems like I saw this about a decade ago…” But link exchange didn’t aim you at linkexchange.com.
Again, inconvenience destroys utility. The only reason I have to go through rojo’s intermediary screen is to provide them with ad revenue. That makes me feel used.
Oh and to Sid … Do you ever sleep man? I swear every day I find some new Sidgizmo.
It’s good marketing for the Rojo team to release this new feature alongside their sponsorship of tomorrow’s TechCrunch party. I’m sure they’ll have more to say at their booth.
“Oh and to Sid … Do you ever sleep man?”
I’ve been having a lot of fun — maybe too much fun (’must … make … deadline!’).
LinkLike is my latest. It is a true child of the web 2.0 renaissance: social-powered, tag-enbaled, blog-oriented, and a bad logo to boot … a work of love. I hope you find it useful.
I have another web app coming along, but I vowed to finish some paying work, first.
Yes — we’ll be at the party tomorrow and would love to answer questions and take suggestions.
To the point that the Feed Listings point back to Rojo.com rather than the feed lister, here’s an honest question: would you rather have one clickthrough to your site or one subscriber to your feed? It’s our view that in general a feed subscription will generate more readership for a blog than a one time link. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Yes, that means we need to direct people to a page that we host to help users subscribe to that feed in their choice of feed readers. But many bloggers might find this to be a good trade off. What do you think: rather have one click or one subscription?
“here’s an honest question: would you rather have one clickthrough to your site or one subscriber to your feed? It’s our view that in general a feed subscription will generate more readership for a blog than a one time link. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”
Chris… leave it up to the user.
Allow them to have the target link be the blog and not Rojo’s RSS feed.
Most users still haven’t (and won’t) move to feeds (and the numbers seem to back this up).
In certain communities the HTML version of the blog will always win.
Kevin
Oh.. you could also do both btw. Have the link be the HTML version but also have an ‘add to rojo’ link at the bottom.
See you on Friday.
Kevin
would you rather have one clickthrough to your site or one subscriber to your feed?
Can’t I still subscribe to the feed once I’ve read the content and gotten a feel for the site?
Perhaps I am abnormal, but I read a lot of sites every day, and only a few per week or even per month get added to my reader.
I think this is a really cool idea, because there is too much content and too many sites to manage, and this has a great contextual way of introducing relevant stuff. However the intermediate step makes it harder to enjoy.
I like the idea, and I understand the thinking behind encouraging feed subscriptions rather than just click-throughs.
One feature I’d like to see is more control over which feeds will (and will not) be shown in my shared space.
Ted, et. al. this is helpful. We’ll come up with some concepts on how to get people right to the content but still make it easy to subscribe for future releases. Appreciate the input.
Wil - will work on some concepts for this too. If you have a specific request, hit me.
Isn’t Blog Explosion already doing something like this with their BlogTextlinks program? BE already have thousands of blogs in their network so I imagine they have a better chance of making it work than Rojo.
Let the users decide if they want to link to their sites or their feeds. Make the link customizable. BTW, the ad units are well-designed, looks cool.
“Let the users decide if they want to link to their sites or their feeds. Make the link customizable.”
Actually a captive RSS audience is perhaps more interesting than a one off visit to a page. What if on that day the visitor doesn’t see anything interesting on the landing page?
At least, with the RSS subscription it will take a few days for him to evaluate, and start visiting the site if the content seems good.
Freitas you’ve got the point.
Is there anybody out there doing this properly. e.g. without pushing you through to a third party (in this case Rojo) instead of directly to the feed. Also it would be nice to find a system that worked on click throughs rather than impressions. If I was running this I would just wrap a DIV around the javascript and set the style to visibility:none. That way it still loads and I get the impression but I wouldnt have to display those pesky ads on my site
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Cool site. Thank you.
It is very dangerous to use Rojo. They have switched to a new interface that doen not work at all. All my feeds disappeared and it is not possibile to exporto opml. They are not giving any information about this incredible demonstration of incompetence!
Couple of sites does this already. One good one is Adleaf http://www.adleaf.com that I use. Non-intrusive and drive some free traffic to my blog site.