Nearly a year after it was bought by Google for $100 million, FeedBurner is finally going to roll out Google’s AdSense as an advertising option for blogs and Websites that use its service to publish their feeds. FeedBurner will start with a few select publishers next week, and then expand the option to all of its customers soon afterwards.

What took them so long? That seemed to be the whole point of the acquisition.

FeedBurner intersperses ads in blog feeds between every few posts. Integrating with AdSense will allow for publishers to tap into contextual ads for their feeds, in addition to the ads that FeedBurner already sells.

Hopefully, Google also found the time to integrate its automated back-end payment system into all FeedBurner accounts. Until recently, FeedBurner was still sends out paper checks to publishers participating in its ad network. At least, that’s how TechCrunch gets paid.

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It’s always fun to get the monthly Feedburner check for advertising they insert into the RSS feed. The actual dollar amount is still next to nothing, but I love the fact that, even with nearly 800,000 publishers, 1.4 million managed feeds, and a $100 million payday from Google, they still haven’t automated the check writing process. Someone hand writes all of these checks every month.

By the way, there’s been a bit of a stir caused by reports yesterday that Feedburner turned off historical stats. CEO Dick Costolo said via email that it was just a bug caused by a code update, and it will be fixed shortly.

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1,511,000: the number of subscribed RSS readers of TechCrunch, according to the Feedburner Widget as I type this post. Given the number is up significantly from the 600,000 odd subscribers we had yesterday, I’m calling it a Feedburner bug.

Feedburner has had a long history of doing strange things with the subscriber counter, and TechCrunch’s readership (if the counter is to be believed) can fluctuate by over 50,000 readers from day to day, but I’ve never seen a 900,000 jump.

If you’ve just gained (or even lost) an extra hundred thousand readers, or perhaps even a million, let us know in the comments.

Update (MA): Occam’s Razor; Feedburner’s CEO Dick Costolo has confirmed it was a bug and that it will be fixed shortly.

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FeedBurner has ceased charging for two premium features following their acquisition by Google in May.

FeedBurner Stats PRO, a service that provides detailed statistics including subscriber numbers, item clickthrough tracking, podcast downloads and aggregate item uses amongst other features, becomes free.

FeedBurner MyBrand, a service that allows users to control the URL of feeds is now free as well; a move that will be strongly welcomed. For many, the biggest argument against using Feedburner was the need to give up control of your feed URL (for example, http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch). Being able to keep ownership of a feed complete with site branding will drive new many new users to Feedburner, including yours truly.

FeedBurner PRO and MyBrand accounts will not be billed effective from June. Although the services are now free, Feedburner users are required to “upgrade” to them from within the Feedburner control panel.

(via SEL)

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Google announced the acquisition of Feedburner today on their corporate blog. Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo confirms it as well on the Feedburner blog. The are not disclosing the price, but our source said it was around $100 million when we wrote about the deal last week, and we still believe that figure is accurate.

Google doesn’t go into a lot of detail on why they bought the company, but they do say they are constantly looking for ways to “identify and offer new tools for content creators and website publishers” and “give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users.”

That tells me one thing: look for the option to include Adwords in your feed sometime very soon. Feedburner already sells adds into feeds on a CPM basis. Google’s going to crank this up.

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Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point.

Huge congratulations to Feedburner. The company was founded in 2003 and has raised just $10 million in capital over two rounds. Portage Ventures funded their $1 million Series A round in 2004. The $9 million Series B round was closed in mid 2005 (second close in 2006), from Mobius Venture Capital and Union Square Ventures.

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RSS management megavendor FeedBurner released an interesting report this morning about the relative market shares of the various leading RSS reader vendors.  The statistics go beyond mere subscription numbers and focus on what FeedBurner says is more important - reader engagement.

That engagement is measured in two ways, the number of times the feed’s items are loaded and displayed in the reader (called views)  and the number of times a feed’s link is clicked through (called clicks).  TechCrunch, for example, may now have almost 300,000 people subscribed to its feed who log on to their feed reader in a given day - but only a portion of those people view the TechCrunch feed in particular on a given day. I know I’m subscribed to many feeds that I almost never actually read, FeedBurner’s engagement metrics try to parse that behavior out from active readership.

The winning vendors in reader engagement are interesting but so are the larger implications of the numbers being reported. Full details and discussion below the fold (for those not viewing this in a feed reader, that is!)

The moral of the story is that Google Reader has come out of nowhere and stolen the hearts of active RSS users.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Feedburner is testing a new product called “Networks” which are groups of blogs on a single topic that are using Feedburner to manage their RSS feed. The idea is to allow people to subscribe to a single mashed up feed containing all of the content from all of the blogs in that category. See this feed for the venture capital group as an example (which, by the way, I just subscribed to), which lists all of the posts from every blog in the network.

Feedburner has been silent on this, but two of their investors, Brad Feld from Mobius Venture Capital and Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, blogged about it.

In his post Brad says Feedburner is testing a few networks, and Fred suggests sewing, garage music and scuba diving as examples of possible topice.

There are currently 17 feeds included in the VC network, listed here. The goal from a publishers perspective is to gain readers (and I assume a subscriber to the network counts in each of their individual feed counts), as well as advertising revenue, which Feedburner is now selling into feeds at reasonable CPMs (but, as I know from experience, very low sell through rates). The page linked above also lists total subscribers on those blogs. It’s not clear if they are double counting duplicate subscribers across multiple blogs or not.

The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic. It isn’t clear if there will be any real quality control - in his post Brad says each network will have a gatekeeper to make sure only blogs on topic are included, but there doesn’t appear to be any hurdle as to what constitutes a quality blog in a topic. That could work out badly. And if the bloggers and/or the network coordinator are making subjective decisions on which blogs can be included in a given network, this will end in tears. The politics around who’s in and who’s out of a blog network are impossible. I know this from personal experience.

Our previous posts on Feedburner are here.

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Chicago-based RSS management company Feedburner is announcing the acquisition of Blogbeat on Monday. The deal will allow Feedburner to expand its reach with customers beyond RSS management. Details as Feedburner.com/blogbeat.

We profiled Blogbeat in February. It is a blog analytics service similar to Measure Map (which was itself acquired by Google in February 2006).

In a phone conversation last night, Steve Olechowski, Feedburner’s COO, said that they have been looking to build or buy a web analytics product to complement their existing RSS analytics tools. Steve expects full integration of the Blogbeat service with Feedburner by Q4 of this year. At that point Feedburner customers will have the ability to see web and RSS statistics for their blogs in a single dashboard.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Blogbeat’s founder, Jeff Turner, has joined Feedburner and will run the web analytics group.

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The first TECH cocktail event took place on July 6 in Chicago at STATE Restaurant and Café. The event featured Stormhoek South African wine and united over 225 Midwest participants — including venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, developers and tech enthusiasts. Nine Chicago-area companies presented. Pictures from the event are here.

ChicagoCrime.org, the freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago, is one of the original Google Maps mashup applications. It was created by developer Adrian Holovaty, a Chicago resident and lead developer of the Django framework. Chicagocrime.org won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism and was named by the New York Times as one of 2005’s best ideas. While Chicagocrime.org has not taken funding and is not a true company, we thought it was worth highlighting for trailblazing the road for other mashups to emulate.

Coastr, the online social guide to beer, was created with the goal of connecting passionate, like-minded people and new brews and beer drinking establishments. It was created by Brian Eng of Luckymonk and is a simple application built with Ruby on Rails. Coastr allows you to register to submit your favorite beers and beer drinking locations. You can also explore, rate and comment on your favorite beers. Additionally, Coastr offers a WordPress widget that can be added to a blog to share your favorite beers with blog visitors.

ExtraTasty (TechCrunch profile here) fit nicely into the TECH cocktail theme and is a creation of skinnyCorp, which has a suite of online products including the T-Shirt design site Threadless, the independent music site 15 Megs of Fame and Naked and Angry. ExtraTasty is a user-generated drink recipe website featuring tagging, drink submission via the site and text message, in addition to a drink rating system and comments. An interesting feature is the interactive drink measurement scale, which allows you to click on a drink serving size and the scale calculates the appropriate amount of liquor to concoct the specific drink recipe.

FeedBurner, the West Loop-based feed management company, handles over 17 million subscriptions for over 200,000 publishers. FeedBurner has a host of interesting products including feed metrics packages for messaging feed readership. The TechCrunch feed is managed by FeedBurner, which has over 80,000 subscribers. FeedBurner has also has been positioning itself to be a targeted feed advertising option. Leveraging FeedFlare technology, FeedBurner has been able to insert advertisements under content items back on websites. Think of it as an ad network for feeds and sites, which makes FeedBurner an attractive acquisition target.

Gritwire is a creation of Dizpersion Technologies and was previously reviewed on TechCrunch. It offers a number of useful tools including MyGritwire, a flash-based feed aggregator with a built-in podcast and video player, as well as social networking features which allow you to add contacts, recommend and rate feed content. Gritwire recently launched a new feature called GritLists. Gritlists allow you to create an editorialized reading list. Other users can subscribe to your list through the Gritwire aggregator. Just in time for TECHcocktail, Gritwire released Gritlist Badges, which allow you to post your latest reading list on your own blog, website, MySpace or Friendster profile page.

Naymz is an online identity aggregator created by Tom Drugan and four others all formerly of Orbitz. Naymz allows you to aggregate links to all of your personal online content (blogs, photos, social networking profiles, news articles, resumes, etc.) onto one Naymz page. This personal aggregation, or personal Naymz page, will then be optimized for search engine findability for anyone looking to find you via search. The company has five employees and has taken an angel investment of $250,000. Sometimes it is easier to just say just “Google me” rather than dropping a phone number or email address and that is where products like Naymz could come in handy — especially as more people create online identities via blogs, photos or online videos.

RipIt Digital, a music conversion service founded by Greg Frost, converts CDs, cassettes and LPs into digital formats and loads the music onto your iPod, MP3 player or media server. RipIt Digital saves the consumer the time and hassle of ripping music and has similar services to ReadyToPlay.com and GetDigitalInc.com. RipIt Digital has bootstrapped its way to converting more than 2,000 gigabytes of music over the course of one year.

TableTop Interactive brings to together television and the web by turning tables at your sports bar or restaurant into an entertainment control center. Each device is always connected to servers, providing live sports scores and updates linked to a DirecTV sports feed. You can check up on news, play touchscreen games, compete against people at your location and across the country in trivia and fantasy sports, and order drinks and food right from your table at your favorite sports bar. It is like a super remote control so you can watch the game you want to watch, right at your seat. TableTop turned on its first units at Players Sports Bar in San Diego last month. TableTop has an interesting business model, which includes selling the actual devices, monthly service fees, a 50/50 split with any game revenue, and TableTop owners are entitled to 25% of the advertising slots on the system for use to either promote their bar or restaurant or to sell to third parties.

ZapTix, an online community ticketing site created by Christian Perry, recently launched in beta. Since the service is a young beta, and is two weeks from launch thus it is light on ticketing content and has a few wrinkles, but they should be ironed out in the beta period. ZapTix is looking to bring community theaters ticketing to the Internet. In true bootstrapping style the whole company was set up on less than $10,000 by outsourcing every step of the development process and hiring no full-time employees.

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