Just wanted to touch base really quick on your comment. Darren made some great points in response to it but the real cause of Random Good Stuff’s (RGS) large earnings was the fact that RGS is running ads on their site as well as in their feed. The site ads contributed to the majority of RGS’s earnings.

Also, just wanted to touch base on the subscriber threashold that everyone is talking about. Darren is right when he says building the ad network is a balancing act. We don’t want to take on too much content too quickly and not be able to keep pace with the ad sales. We really want publishers in the network to be successful (i.e. we have enough ads to make them some good money) so we are trying to take on publishers as we see ad demand for their content. It doesn’t have anything to do with us only working with the big guys and forgetting everyone else. The long tail of publishers is what makes FeedBurner, well, FeedBurner. I am one of those bloggers in the long tail (plug! – ventureweek.com/blog) and so are many of my colleagues here. I promise we won’t forget our own people in the blogosphere. :-)

Cheers,
Eric Olson
FeedBurner – Business Development
E-mail: erico@feedburner.com
Office: 312.756.0022 x2034

1. different channels attract ads of different values (CPM). I’ve seen ads for $1.50 CPM and ads for $7 CPM

2. different publishers choose to have ads show up at different frequencies (some have them every post, others every 3rd or so).

3. some publishers have them show up on short posts, others only on longer ones

4. I’ve noticed even on the blogs where I choose to have them show up on every post (no matter what length) that they don’t always show up. I’m not sure if this is because feedburner don’t have enough inventory on some channels or whether it’s something else but I don’t think you can just look at traffic as being the only factor to determine how much the ads will earn.

I think the reason they are limiting it to larger sites is that they’re still building up their advertiser list. If they let everyone in they’ve have an over supply of publishers and not enough advertisers to service them all (this is my best guess at why).

I’ve heard that they’re looking to increase the number of publishers as they increase advertisers – sounds like a balancing act.

They say the issue is that they don’t have enough advertisers right now..

But I’ve never understood this “We only want the big guys”. Take 10 sites of my size on different subjects and you probably have almost no duplicate subscribers.. so what’s the problem?

Oh well..

I managed to get my 500 in June and it was Feedburner who got in touch with me and asked if I wanna add FeedBurner ads.

So since June 2006 I am displaying Feedburner ads and in the first month I made $300 bucks… SWEET!

July is much less … not sure why.

How many subscribers on an avg. you need to apply. I know they say a large sub. base and I surely don’t have that much compared to problogger. So can you tell me the approx. subscribers?

But since you want to make money from your rss feeds, how do you prevent the “fair use” scrappers?