Feedburner is a service that helps publishers set up, promote, monetize, and track the performance of their RSS feeds.
Feedburner offers a variety of widgets as well – widgets that display the number of readers a blog has, widgets that display a blog’s feed as HTML, and of course, widgets that allow readers to subscribe to a given feed.
But I’m not really going to talk about these widgets today. Instead I’m going to talk about why I think Feedburner will soon join the ranks of the widget aggregators.
During my research for the Google Gadgets review, I read a number of different reactions to the announcement from folks like Pete Cashmore, Timothy Post, and Fred Wilson. One of the things that struck me during my research was that Fred had used a Feedburner widget to implement a Google Gadget on his sidebar.
This would seem like an unnecessary step. Fred could have easily just plugged the code directly from Google into his blog. Why take the time to overwrite one of the Feedburner widgets with code from Google Gadgets?
So it got me thinking. How different are RSS feeds from widget codes? They both represent content that has been set free from its original point of publishing. More importantly, how different are the needs of blog publishers from the needs widget publishers? Couldn’t widget publishers stand to benefit from Feedburner’s core services of promotion, monetization, and analytics?
The site that I work for as a day job is investing heavily in enabling user generated widgets (uhhh, UGW?). One of the issues that we are trying to solve is how to help our army of non-technical publishers monetize and track the performance of their various widgets. So far, we are at a complete and utter loss.
We’ve talked to Google about allowing us to plug in our publishers’ AdSense ID’s into their widgets, but so far Google is unwilling to risk seeing AdSense ads show up on sites that haven’t been vetted by their quality teams. My conclusion to date is that there’s just not a sophisticated, distributed monetization tool available for widgets yet.
The new crop of widget aggregators like Widgetbox, Snipperoo, and Google Gadgets seems to be completely focused at the moment on the delivery and promotion aspects of widgets. Making it easier for folks to use widgets, and helping developers / publishers get the word out about their widgets.
This is great, but it’s only part of the puzzle – monetization and analytics are also extremely important.
So that brings me back to Feedburner. Nobody has done a better job of providing value at all steps along a blogger’s development process. They have built a distributed ad network. They have sophisticated, distributed analytics tools. They know the aggregation business.
Fred Wilson is perhaps the biggest evangelist for widgets on the Web, and he is an investor in Feedburner. Yesterday, he plugged a widget into his blog using the Feedburner platform.
I’m not really a conspiracy kind of guy, but I would be surprised if the smart folks from Feedburner aren’t getting ready for a run in this area.
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