Already a leader in the RSS ad network space, Feedburner has moved further into the web page space by making ads available in between blog posts and content items. Feedburner investor Fred Wilson also comments on it and why he thinks this is a good move.
I think there will be some challenges for Feedburner growing it to be a significant business because of a few factors.
1. The blog space has a loud voice, but lower ad volume than some people realize. There are great target audiences in the blogosphere, but in sheer volume I’m not sure huge volume is really there yet. The most popular blogs just don’t get anything close to the amount of traffic of many normal web sites running advertising. The limited volume reach makes it hard to get some of the larger ad dollars because it’s not necessarily enough volume to make it worthwhile. The classic chicken and the egg problem.
2. How will it work with ad servers? I know Feedburner is going beyond blogs and working with feeds/content from larger web publishers as well. Which I think could really help the volume problem I just mentioned. However, these large players have ad servers where they manage their advertising. Will Feedburner’s more unique way of displaying ads interact with ad servers? How does a publisher know whether to run Adsense ads between content, Feedburner ads, or another ad network?
I think it’s a good move for Feedburner, but I think they may need to partner and look at ways to grow their scale quickly because I think they can be a player.