After more than two months of testing, Google has finally turned on AdSense for Feeds. Formerly, these were FeedBurner ads. The acquired company has moved its advertising program over to Google’s system, and now any AdSense advertiser can tap into the Feedburner network.

The ads are contextual and come in different sizes and formats. Google Operating System, which noticed that the service is now turned on, reports:

The new AdSense for Feeds option lets you create a new ad unit that has a format automatically selected from 468×60 and 300×250. . . . You can choose if you want image ads, the ad frequency, the position (top or bottom of the post), the colors and a channel that tracks the ad performance.

Hopefully, this will turbocharge ads in feeds, which have not been a stellar performer so far. Does anybody click on those ads? Maybe they should be seen more as branding opportunity, because you certainly see them when you are scrolling through your blog and news feeds.

It is hardly surprising that FeedBurner’s subscriber numbers can be faked. What is surprising is how easy it is to do so. As the video above shows, all you need is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their Netvibes page. The result was 2,500 widgets of the blog feed, which FeedBurner counts as separate subscribers.

Why does this matter? Blogs like to tout how many RSS subscribers they have because, even if it is a smaller number than direct visitors to their site, it represents their most loyal readers. That’s why we display how many RSS readers we have in the Feedburner chicklet at the top of TechCrunch (currently 850,000). For these numbers to have any meaning, though, they cannot be as easy to game as the video shows. (And, no, we don’t game our numbers).

You’d think that Google would be smart enough not to double-count these things, or at least ask Netvibes and other widget start pages to de-duplicate the numbers for them by user. What appears to be happening here is that FeedBurner counts each widget for a particular feed on Netvibes as a separate subscriber, regardless of whether that widget is on ten thousand different user pages or repeated ten thousand times on the same page. The same thing happened a couple years ago with Pageflakes.

Update: Netvibes VP of Product Development Franck Mahon responds in comments that it is working to fix the problem of duplicates, but that there are other ways to “hack the numbers.” And he notes that it might be more useful to count active subscribers than just people who may have added a feed two years ago and never read it.

Over a year has passed since Google completed the acquisition of feed massaging and hosting service Feedburner, and today some users now finally have their feeds hosted on what appears to be Google’s servers and infrastructure. At Techcrunch we have always been big fans of Feedburner, and their widgets and RSS subscriber counts have adorned almost all of our sites since their first days. At some point in the past 12 hours, the feed URL at feeds.feedburner.com began to redirect to feedproxy.google.com. Our subscriber count widget dropped to displaying a zero count for a few hours while the domain change took place.

It appears that only select feeds have been migrated, mostly those with higher subscriber counts. This would indicate that Feedburner has turned to Google to assist with serving the load on high-traffic feeds. Over at TechcrunchIT I recently wrote about the problems that some acquired companies have experienced at Google. The proprietary software and hosting stack at Google can often lead to a slowdown in development, an often long migration phase and in some cases death for the acquired company or product. Feedburner has avoided these problems by remaining largely independent of Google since the acquisition, but at some point they have turned to pappa bear for assistance with handling load and we are seeing the results of that today.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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 More

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.

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.

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.

Feedburner and TypePad will announce a partnership on Thursday that will allow TypePad users to automatically redirect their existing TypePad RSS feed into Feedburner. Until now, if a TypePad user wanted to transfer RSS subscribers to a Feedburner RSS feed (and take advantage of Feedburner stats for those subscribers), each subscriber to the old feed would be required to change their subscription to the new feed. Since subscribers have little incentive to do this, many Feedburner publishers end up managing multiple RSS feeds over time. This partnership will save them the hassle of doing that.

Look for more partnerships like this from Feedburner over time. Details on the partnership are here.

Some of you may have noticed that we’ve included a “Subscribe to TechCrunch by Email” widget on the right sidebar of TechCrunch for the last few days.

ReadWriteWeb and I have been quietly testing a superb new FeedBurner blog-to-email product that addresses every feature I requested on No. 2 of this list. This new (free) Email Subscriptions product launches officially this morning and can be found under the “publicize” link at Feedburner.

Key features:

• Free
• Daily emails
• Blog Branding – Feedburner plugs are all at the bottom and minimized
• Very good HTML/CSS rendering – posts look just right in the email (see screen shot below)
• Blogger owns the email list and can export it at any time

Feedburner has existing partnerships with Feedblitz and Squeet for their competing products – those partnerships remain in place and bloggers will have a choice as to which of the three services to use.

My recommendation to bloggers: consider using this product. There are a lot of people out there who have not made the jump to RSS readers yet. You want to get your content in front of them, and this is another way to do it. Based on some stats that Fred Wilson (an investor in FeedBurner) published last year, we can expect about 1 email subscriber for every 5 RSS subscribers.

You can register for the TechCrunch daily email in the widget above or in the right sidebar.

Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo emailed Richard MacManus and me on Monday to give us a preview of what he calls “broad enhancement to our stats” that are being released later this morning.

I’ve had a chance to review the new functionality (screen shot below) and I agree that these changes are both needed and useful.

The key change is to give users more information on what items in feeds are actually getting “viewed” and clicked on. Until now bloggers could not get this information – analytics services like MeasureMap and BlogBeat give us good insight into what’s being done on the actual site, but unless a click through to the site occurs from a feed, there was little or no information on what was actually being read off site. FeedBurner’s new stats go a long way toward mitigating this problem.

They are also showing what they call “uncommon” sources which allow bloggers to see where their feeds are being read and re-used beyond the standard RSS readers like Rojo and Bloglines, and new tools for podcasters to track downloads.

Dick summarized all of the new features in his email:

The new features are:

a) Uncommon uses. We track 200k feeds and so we see everywhere feeds are used regularly. When we see someplace a feed is referenced or clicked that we don’t recognize as a common reference, we highlight it here in the dashboard and on the detailed uncommon uses page. Could be a cool little newfilter somebody wrote, could be a blog somebody assembled from feeds, could be a cool little web-based aggregator we’ve never heard of, could be blog spam. Whatever it is, we’ve found that publishers love to see these unique uses and references and that it’s very helpful to have something like feedburner that can leverage a broad base of common references to point out the uncommon ones. You can then “whitelist” or “hide” references you already know about (note that your own site will be an uncommon reference, whitelist that one right away), and you’ll never be Alerted to whitelisted domains on your dashboard again.

b) Better integration of item stats and feed stats, better clickthrough to items for more details

c) Reach! Now we start to give you an idea of what percent of your subscribers actually looked at or clicked on one of your items today. This is step one. We will spend a lot more time on reach based on how people react to v1 here. We know there’s much more to dive into on this.

d) Historical reach and subscription from the dashboard…..you can now click back through the days on the dashboard chart to see reach and item popularity by day.

e) Podcasters – better feed level download tracking. In addition to subscribers we now identify the number of people that actually downloaded a particular podcast. This will get even more robust in the future as we provide download numbers from the podcast on the site and sum that with the feed based downloads. This release is feed based downloads only.

This comes on the heals of FeedBurner’s 2 year birthday and announced funding from Union Square Ventures earlier this month. The company has raised a total of $10 million to date.

There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end.

What I do want to write about as I reminisce about the year ending in a couple of days are the Web 2.0 companies that I love and use every day.

I’ve tested over a thousand products this year, and have written about hundreds. And while some of the companies I write about get very positive reviews, I find that the only true test of the value of a product is its staying power: do I continue to use the product, and maybe even pay for it, as the days and months go by?

So for those of you that are curious, here is a short list of the companies that have held my attention, and that I would not choose to live without on the web:

Bloglines

I have a love/hate relationship with Bloglines, but they’ve recently improved performance dramatically, and I really like that I can see the number of subscribers for each feed. This was the hardest one to include on the list, but at the end of the day I couldn’t leave them off.

Del.icio.us

I use Del.icio.us multiple times every day to store and retrieve bookmarks. I freely admit that there are better solutions out there and I may very well switch to one of them in the near future, but you have to hand it to Del.icio.us for inventing the social bookmark phenomenon.

FeedBurner

I love the statistics Feedburner provides on feed readership and has lots of advanced features that are important to me. And despite what I’ve written in the past, I know and trust the FeedBurner team. I just wish they’d get rid of the advertisement on my feed page.

Flickr

I enjoy Flickr more and more every day. I like seeing what my friends are up to based on the photos they upload as well as getting comments from others on my pictures. And I am starting to go back and upload old sets of photos from years ago. Flickr is just perfect.

Measuremap

The Measure Map blog analytics tool created by Adaptive Path gives me incredible insight into who is looking at what on TechCrunch. They need to deal with the speed issue for larger blogs though (it takes minutes sometimes to pull up stats, or just breaks).

Memeorandum

Memeorandum is how I keep up on the blogosphere when I don’t have time to read all of my feeds. It has also changed what I blog about, and how. Memeorandum is a cultural phenomenon.

Netvibes

Yeah, there are a lot of Ajax desktops out there, but Netvibes seems to stay ahead of the pack on functionality. The flickr stuff is great. Plus, how can I not love a service that includes TechCrunch as a default feed?

Omnidrive

I’ve been waiting for something like this forever. I forsee a day when a service like Omnidrive comes packaged with a new PC, or is offered alongside web email solutions. I’ve only had it for a few days, but I’m smitten. And fair disclosure: there are some awesome competitors out there, too, that I am just starting to look at.

Pandora

I listen to Pandora whenever I write – sometimes for hours a day. I’ve discovered countless new artists from it.

Skype

What can I say? Along with Vonage, Skype keeps my phone bills down to next to nothing, and it is an integral part of my everyday business and personal life. I would trade application sharing for the new video feature in a heartbeat, however.

Technorati

I use it more than Google. No one has launched anything better, yet. And they’ve made great progress in search speed over the latter half of the year.

Wordpress

I love Wordpress. Actually, let me rephrase that statement: I love Wordpress 1.5. Version 2.0 makes me want to throw my laptop out of the window. But it is an amazing piece of software, and all of my blogs run on it.

Yahoo Maps

I use Yahoo Maps because it allows multi-point driving instructions, something none of the others offer yet. This was incredibly useful when I had to attend three or four holiday parties on the same evening.

FeedBurner is launching FeedFlare tonight – a group of web services that can be integrated by the publisher into her/his feed. FeedFlare is located under the “Optimize” tab within the FeedBurner dashboard.

FeedBurner is also releasing a full set of open APIs to allow third party developers to build and integrate customized services.

Give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including as many or few of the services listed below. FeedFlare places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item in your feed, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content.

If a publisher chooses to include one or more services, they appear at the bottom of the feed. Currently offered services include:

• Email this – Send a link to your item to someone via email.
• Email author – Allow subscribers to email you directly.
• Technorati Cosmos – Display the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati.
• Del.icio.us tags – Lists del.icio.us tags for an item.
• Save to del.icio.us – Allows subscribers to bookmark the item with del.icio.us.
• Count comments – Lists the number of comments posted to an item (for WordPress blogs only).
• Creative Commons – Displays the Creative Commons license that you may have applied to your feed or post.

I’ve added a number of these to the TechCrunch feed. Just look to the bottom of any post, within the feed or in a feed reader.

The really interesting part of this announcement, however, is that FeedBurner is opening up the API and allowing anyone to build in their own services. Del.icio.us competitors, for example, can build their own version of this and promote it to publishers. Or entirely different types of applications can be built. I like having interactive services like these being built directly into the feed. Richard MacManus has more.