Eric Lunt is cofounder and CTO of FeedBurner, which hosts more than 60,000 feeds for over 40,000 publishers reaching subscribers all over the world – at last count around 2 million.
Here he talks to us about contextual networks, custom feeds, and what’s next for the Chicago company. Oh yea – and dancing pandas.
1. It’s easy to assume that everyone has a blog, or is at least reading them. Still, recent surveys say that’s far from the case. What do you think it’s going to take for FeedBurner (and others like you) to push readership to the next level? Have you noticed any interesting trends emerging among the feeds you monitor?
Feeds are a great way to keep up with the blogs and news sources that an individual likes to follow, but they are much more than that. Feeds are really a standard, extensible mechanism for exchanging “items of interest.” So, while blogs were really the first publishing medium to embrace feeds, we’re now seeing things like podcasts, photos, earthquake notifications, and search results being delivered via feeds. Our company is called FeedBurner instead of BlogBurner because we want to provide services for all producers of feeds. The analytics and transformations that we can apply to feeds can be appropriate for a wide variety of formats.
2. Right now Feedburner’s managing data from over 67,000 feeds. Are there any plans to roll them all up into a contextual advertising network? If so, do you expect it to take advantage of programs offered by Google and Yahoo (as Findory has) or would you be building based upon a new model?
We’re being very deliberate with the kinds of advertising services we offer publishers and are taking the time to really understand the opportunities and challenges surrounding ads in feeds so publishers get the most out of the monetization opportunity.
One thing that’s clear is that feeds represent a unique opportunity to connect to a dedicated audience, and understanding that may translate to an approach that may be different than traditional Web-based advertising. For example, a feed associated with an iPod enthusiast community probably wouldn’t benefit from ads promoting discounts on iPods. However, that same ad might do well on a Web site where users most likely found themselves as a result of a search. We are monitoring early performance metrics closely and will continue to provide our publishers with best practices as they evolve.
3. Right now there’s a lot of great web site analytics tools on the market. It’s easy to imagine them building their own blog/feed tool and infringing upon Feedburner’s space. How is Feedburner going to maintain their competitive advantage? Why can you provide better feed-based analytics than some of the existing analytics companies?
No other company provides as many feed management services to as many publishers as FeedBurner, so I guess you could say our competitive advantage comes from hands-on experience and our dedication to provide the best services on the market. Feeds are pretty different beasts, and we’ve invested a lot of time to understand the differences between web access patterns and feed access patterns.
The biggest difference between web stats gathering and feed stats is that a feed “transaction” is actually divided into two stages: there’s the actual feed retrieval stage, and then there’s the rendering and actionable stage when the items are actually viewed and acted upon. By managing the feed itself, we’re able to integrate the information from both phases to provide a much richer picture of the feed consumption characteristics.
Web analysis is of course also valuable and has its own difficult problems to solve (such as page flows and inferring sessions); we’re concentrating on solving the difficult measurement problems uniquely associated with feeds.
4. Recently you responded to some criticism regarding your firm’s practice of for creating custom feeds from the original feeds people provide when using your service. Your June 10th blog entry announced a solution to this issue. What led to this decision and was it a difficult one to make? What other firms need to do the same?
Making the decision was easy: anything we can do to give publishers increased control over their feed is only going make publishers feel more comfortable using our services. We’re confident enough in the value we add for publishers that we want to do everything we can to avoid creating some kind of artificial “lock-in” situation.
While the decision to offer the service was easy, coming up with a technical solution to make a seamless transition between feed locations was a bit harder. We looked at the different ways the feed readers handle the situation of a moving feed and came up with the three-part phased approach detailed in that blog post.
I think Fred Wilson said it best in his post, “It’s MY Feed, Stupid!” The creators of publishing tools need to support exactly the kinds of actions that Fred mentions, and we at FeedBurner will do whatever we can to support these efforts.
5. You mention in your personal blog that you and your 2 year old daughter like to play Katamari Damacy, a psychedelic computer game with dancing pandas, flying mushrooms, and a magical castle. What are some of your other favorite online diversions? (blogs, web sites, games, etc.)
I wish I had more time for games (I’m still trying to finish Half-Life 2), but growing FeedBurner is really my passion right now and tends to consume any “free time”. I’m really loving the Yahoo! Music Unlimited music service, and I usually listen to a couple new albums every night. I use FeedDemon to follow about 150 feeds, and I check my reader almost as much as I check my email.
But really, I’m pretty much into anything with dancing pandas.
Great interview. Thanks for sharing that information.