Is it me or is the ‘new’ Technorati worse than the old one? Look, I really like being able to see who is linking to this site and finding new voices and authors. But Technorati has been getting buggier and buggier over the last few months. And now with the new site, I can’t do much of anything. It will let me login, but when I click something else, it just kicks me out again. Login, kick out. Login, kick out. What fun. The concept is great, but sheesh, Technorati doesn’t seem to me to be a service ready to get out of beta.
Alan notes that Feedster is going to start a similar service soon, and I claimed my blog in anticipation. But with the good news about tracking and linking stats comes this troubling development:
“Ad Revenue Sharing – If you publish your feed using Feedster, we will offer an opt-in mechanism by which we insert ads in your feed and share the revenue with you.”
Ok, who am I, with my toe in the advertising water, to complain about another potential revenue stream for bloggers. But ads on Weblogs are one thing. Since I rarely actually visit any of the sites on my blogroll these days, I have no problem. But not the feeds. Puhleese…not the feeds!
Hi there,
As one of the authors of Feedster here and the guy who’ll take the most heat on this issue (I expect to be burned in effigy actually), here are some comments:
a) Ads in feeds are coming. There’s no question about that. If you use Infoworld feeds you already get them. If your feed provider uses Feedburner they might well have them.
b) The question is … Can ads within Feeds be made better than ads in other media? We actually think so.
c) This stuff costs real money these days. The feed universe is large. What we used to do with a $200 / month rented server now requires more money to operate annually then I’ve made in salary since the boom. We’re a 24×7 environment with real servers and real engineering.
d) I do think its important for people to have a way to opt out of ads entirely. At least for me I’d be fine with some amount of token $$$ to get feeds w/o ads.
e) Anything we do with ads in feeds has to NOT BREAK AGGREGATORS. That’s a challenge for us and I screwed up recently on this one. We now have been roundly slapped by the community and will avoid making that mistake again.
f) I strongly invite you to get in touch with us directly, off blog, and help us not make mistakes. scott[a]t[] feedster.com for feedback.
Thanks
Scott
I’d say that Bloglines is becoming the best place to track referrals.