Matt McAllister posted about Feedburner’s deal with IDG Publishing. Matt has some good comments, and I share a lot of his thoughts. Feedburner is currently providing great services for RSS publishers, and in doing so they’re really building up a huge marketshare and mindshare in the RSS feed management space.

They’re building their RSS ad network, and it naturally makes sense that because so many publishers are using Feedburner for feed management and analytics that when they’re ready for advertising Feedburner is the first choice. Feedburner isn’t pushing it hard now, but as the RSS advertising space matures, they’ve got the early footing.

Even if RSS advertising never catches fire, they’re still able to charge for advanced feed analytics, so a backup revenue stream is in play. I’m sure there are many other future services they could build in and charge for as well. They’re playing it right by building the relationships with publishers now, so they can end up getting money from them later.