RSS and Blog Advertising recap

By Vivek | December 30th, 2006 at 11:20 am ET     1 Comment »    

As the year ends in which the graph for number of blogs coming up every moment has seen a steep upward slope and so has been the adoption of RSS feeds, I think it will be good idea to have a quick recap of companies/startups offering specialized advertising for RSS feeds, and Blog. Most of the companies offering Ad publishing services, which started in 2005/06, continue to operate in private-beta or invite only beta or early public launch stage. Stats for CTRs and revenues generated from RSS feeds are hard to come by while at the same time major blogs and blog networks reported 60% or more traffic coming through RSS feeds.

Comparing this to mobile advertising space, which has also started picking up from 2006, I am amazed at the growth of Admob. Admob has served more than 734 million mobile ad views in around 1 year of its existence. I think we have yet to come across such a formidable player in the RSS industry that gives accurate metrics for ads served or revenue generated for its publishers. Given the fact that RSS is getting integrated with Outlook, already being integrated with Thunderbird, and other feed consumption tools from major companies like  Google, I expect more mainstream RSS adoption. Number of people believe that widgets might overshadow RSS adoption, which will definitely be tested in 2007. Personally I think RSS will continue to grow more on the corporate side, while personal users will tend to use widgets. This in turn means that an increased number of publishers will be looking to monetize their content on either platform.

Anyhow enough digression from the original idea. Below are some of the options that Blog/Feed publishers have for placing ads in their RSS feeds –

FeedBurner - Prime mover in the RSS space has its own FeedBurner Ad Network. Publishers have options to review and approve CPM based Ad Campaigns, and customize ad insertion frequency in their feed and site. FeedBurner’s keeps 35% of the net advertising revenue for ads running in your feed. However FeedBurner has yet to automate signups for the publishing service that can take couple of more days to kickoff. Variety and number of advertisers in the Ad Network is another issue.

Pheedo - Pheedo is one of the oldest companies offering Feed advertising. Pheedo does CPM and CPC based text, logo, and banner ads and also offers geo-targeting capabilities for ads in RSS feeds and on-site ads. Publishers can run Pheedo Ads inside their FeedBurner managed feeds. To get started publishers just need to cut and paste Pheedo RSS ad code into their blog feed templates. Earlier in September 2006 Pheedo and Simplefeed had entered into a partnership to bring new RSS marketing tools to publishers.

Text Link Ads - Feedvertising from TLA enables placing of unobtrusive text link ads into the bottom of RSS feeds. TLA ads for feeds are available for publishers using Wordpress software and will need to install a plugin to get started.

Google Adsense - Adsense for Feeds has been in works for the past 1.5 years. I haven’t come across any reports for a definite date for the launch of a public beta. Have seen few bloggers using it though. Adsense for feeds mimics the regular Adsense in terms of placing contextual ads.

Qumana Q-Ads - Qumana has its Q-Ads service that can be place ads in your blog post, on your website, and in your RSS feed. Qumana has a DIY advertising model that runs on the logic that publisher understands his/her content best and should be selecting the ads to be placed in the blog or feed. While writing a blog post that supports Q-Ads insertion(Live Writer, Qumana Blog editor,..), publisher can “select a keyword, refine the result, and when you are satisfied .. click, a pertinent ad is placed where you have decided it belongs”. Sounds interesting but can take precious few minutes while positing an high priority news item.

Fedafi - Currently in beta for Advertisers. Registration open for Publishers. They have just launched beta of their Fedafi Wordpress Plugin that allows you to sell advertising space in your RSS feeds through their publisher network.

SimpleFeed - SimpleFeed is one of 4 softwares offered in the recently launched Intel SuiteTwo. Site does indicate that feed publishers can have image or text ads placed where and when they like.

As for specialized blog Advertising we have few additional companies offering Ad publishing services. These include Federated Media Publishing(fmpub), Performancing, and Blogads.

Skype on Nokia early next year

By Vivek | December 29th, 2006 at 10:37 am ET     5 Comments »    

According to the Swedish S60 Blog, Skype is planning to rollout it’s mobile client as early as January 2007. Skype has been working with Stockholm based Ocean Observations since 2005 to develop the mobile app. The Skype service is most likely to work on WiFi enabled Nokia phones(later on Sony Ericssons Symbian based phones) and might pave the way for free worldwide calling.

We have already seen startups like Fring, SoonR, EQO offering Skype calling from mobile. However each of them have seen limited uptake ’cause of one or more reasons. Fring requires a data plan to enable calls over the data network that are really pricey in US, while SoonR and EQO want you to be near your PC when you are making your calls. Skype plans to counter these issues by offering a Skype mobile client that is powered by WiFi connection. In terms of feature set, Skype is looking to go a step further by integrating the Skype and phone contacts(I wish Google did this for Gtalk on BB).

Earlier Gizmo Project in partnership with Nokia had launched it’s Gizmo Project VoIP client on Nokia N80 phones. N80, which has WiFi capabilities, enables users to make cheap calls to landlines and other mobile phone users. Last time I checked, users were facing issues related to making mobile-to-mobile Gizmo calls.

Links:
Swedish S60 Blog on Skype Mobile

Boorah - natural phrased local search

By Vivek | December 28th, 2006 at 11:55 pm ET         

Boorah has been quietly developing its local search engine based on the Natural Language Search(NLS) technology. We already have 2 well funded startups, Powerset and Phrasetrain, developing their search engines that use NLS concepts in the back-end. Co-founded by Eric Moyer and Nagaraju Bandaru, both of whom worked at MetroFi, Boorah wants to utilize its patent-pending NLS for subset of the local search world - restaurant search and reviews.

Boorah, which is still in alpha stage, currently aggregates restaurant reviews for Bay Area and enables users to search using regular phrases like “Best wine list in San Francisco”. Besides this you can always search by street & cross street, point of interest, cuisine, and tag. Boorah aggregates results both from sites like Yelp and individual user reviews of businesses by Boorah users itself. Since Boorah is still in alpha stage I will avoid writing about design and UI that does require lot of rework. Getting the local data to power the results will always be a challenge for a startup. Will really like to know how Boorah goes about that.

Powerreviews is another startup currently in private beta that enables search by customer review keywords, which I found to be very effective as compared to regular search or category browsing.

Links:
Boorah

Gmail Mail evaporates; I don’t think so

By Vivek | December 28th, 2006 at 07:06 pm ET         

Blogosphere has lately got into habit of overblowing news especially if it is anything related to Google. Hot news of the day is that few users of Gmail have lost all their emails. You can checkout the discussion thread going on at Google  Group for Gmail.

After a bit of research into all the posts in that thread you will notice that all the people posting messages about lost and deleted emails have never written anything on the Google Groups before, which I think is strange. Also most of them are asking about how to contact Gmail Support in the Google Group, where in the first place link inside Gmail Help leads to Google Gmail Group.

Even if the people reporting the issue did really loose all their email, it is quite possible that they themselves accidentally deleted the emails  and now want to blame Google for that. Google has millions of users and 5-10 people mistakenly deleting each and every mail in their Inbox on the same day is not a big number.

Also company like Google should have enough backups of your email. Especially since Google is now offering Gmail for SMBs I think it is highly unlikely for them not to maintain backups of highly critical customer data. If they openly put that in writing that they really do keep backups, users will just spam the support with such mail retrieval requests.

Digg honeymoon continues; gets additional $8.5 million

By Vivek | December 28th, 2006 at 01:19 pm ET         

Even as rumors and controversies surround the social news rating site Digg, it has received additional funding of $8.5 million from its existing backers including Greylock Partners and the Omidyar Network. As Matt Marshal from VentureBeat reports, Digg management team has intentionally not included new investors into the new funding round.

Users trying to game the system, external companies paying to get posts dugg, collaborative digging, top diggers digging for favors, and some unusually low digged content reaching the front-page, are just some of the challenges Digg has seen in the recent past. I had never thought mainstream media like corruption will get to social media this soon. Given all these reasons and the quality of content dished out, I still digg Slashdot as compared to Digg.

Links:
VentureBeat on Digg funding