After three months of participation in FeedBurner’s Ad Network I received my first payment (for April) yesterday.
Feedburners ads are the ones you’ll see in my RSS feeds. My first impression review of FAN is still pretty accurate to how I’ve found the system.
I’ve added it to three of my blogs (the ones with the biggest RSS subscriber lists) and while April only earned me $79 – that was only from 10 or so days with it on just one blog (ProBlogger).
The amount FAN is earning me varies quite a bit between my three blogs. Problogger is actually the better earner – partly because it has the most subscribers but also probably because it has full feeds rather than partial and perhaps because it’s channel is a better paying one than the others (blogs are put in channels depending upon their topics – some attract higher CPM than others).
There have been a good variety of advertisers over the period. I like that I can approve or reject advertisers as they sign up. I’ve actually rejected about 20% to this point (either because they were willing to pay only a small CPM or because I felt they were inappropriate for my feeds.
I’m pretty sure they are still restricting publishers joining FAN to those with larger subscriber lists but if you get the opportunity and have a large enough subscriber base I’d say it’s definitely worth a go.
Since my blawg is largely a public service announcement, I am not worried about my rss feed being captured, modified for “fair use”, and monetized on a higher traffic site. Envious perhaps.
But since you want to make money from your rss feeds, how do you prevent the “fair use” scrappers?
I’ve been reading a lot of your posts on this website and your Living Room one and I must say you have a certain knack at this blogging thing. Personally, I think that you deserve every AdSense dollar that you come across. You have a way with words that not to many bloggers have and I think that is why you have succeeded so. Keep up the good work.
Darren,
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?
You need to have 500 subscribers average..
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.
[…] Pro Blogger: Feedburner Ad Network – Three Months In […]
I applied and they told me they needed 500. I’m only at 290 or so right now, so I need to improve a little or they need to lower their standards :-)
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..
the smallest blog I have it running on has a subscriber base of over 600 but I’ve heard 500 would be ok too.
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.
Wait – someone made $300 in a month off 500 subscribers? That can’t be right – I have about 600 subscribers, 6-7 posts a day, and so far I’m averaging about $5 a month from feedburner.
Steve – take into consideration a couple of things:
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.
Steve – also – I’m not seeing any ads in your feed today. Perhaps you should have a chat to Feedburner about why that might be the case? Maybe the channel you’re a part of doesn’t have enough inventory?
[…] Professional Blogging Jul 30 at 10:50 pm by Matt -Darren has a brief three month review of the Feedburner Ad Network over at Problogger. Thought i’d chime in with my thoughts. […]
[…] Darren Rowse of ProBlogger has briefly posted his thoughts on his first three months participation in FeedBurner’s Ad Network and earned him a tidy $79 for 10 days in his RSS. […]
[…] ProBlogger: Feedburner Ad Network – Three Months In […]
I signed up hopefully I get approved or accepted as a publisher.
well, thanks darren and all for the reply. I think I have to wait a bit more :(
Steve,
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: [email protected]
Office: 312.756.0022 x2034
Well, I’m very keen to participate in FB’s Ad Network. But, given my number of subscribers (at the moment), this is an aspiration! ;-)
[…] somewhere in the Feedburner system. Because based on what i read from someone else comment at Problogger, and Yugatech. You need to get at least 500 RSS Subscribers to join the Feedburner […]