We're Hiring! Account Manager - Search Feed Product

December 28, 2009

Start the new year off with a new job at Pheedo.

To fuel our tremendous growth, Pheedo is looking for an experienced account manager for our search feed product. The qualified candidate in this newly created position will be responsible for managing Pheedo's premium PPC ad inventory (accessible via XML feeds). You will report to the Director of Publisher Relations and Client Services, with a dotted-line relationship to executives within the company.

Join one of the fastest growing, profitable, new media companies in Old Town Oakland, CA: Pheedo, Inc combines world-class RSS analytics with one-of-kind monetization tools for the real-time web. Since 2005, we have been helping premium publishers including The New York Times, CNET, MSNBC, ABC, PCWorld and more successfully deliver billions of pieces of online content monthly to over 40 million subscribers.

SUMMARY: ACCOUNT MANAGER - SEARCH FEED PRODUCT
Fully manage the internal and external execution of our search feed product. Responsible for search feed yield optimization and revenue analysis for the Pheedo network. Serve as a primary point of contact for our search feed partners, scheduling of A/B tests on ad units/placements and search feed monetization strategies.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Own reporting and analysis of search feed traffic, revenue, and product performance using both internal and external data.


• Master understanding of business rules and logic for displaying search feed listings in RSS feeds; Responsible for ongoing analysis of business rules and strategy for optimizing revenue.


• Stay on top of trends in search advertising and in search product development.


• Manage cross-functional projects for enhancements and product releases. Own product modeling (testing, analysis), writing business cases and product requirements documents, and prioritizing project list and product release schedule.


• Manage relationship with 3rd party search feed listings providers, analyzing metrics and recommending methods for relevance and revenue enhancements. Manage process of recruiting new search feed partners. Understand performance implications on scores, recommending tests and modifications to help enhance scores.


• Serve as team contact with Finance for revenue forecasting and yield analysis. Stay on top of traffic and revenue trends for weekly, monthly, and quarterly reporting to finance.

• 2 -3 years experience with pay per click advertising & search engine marketing, with emphasis on analytics.


• Web savvy individual with a good understanding of PPC feed syndication, search marketing and a thorough working knowledge of feed management.


• This position requires hands-on experience analyzing website and other data to drive tactical marketing decision making.


• Highly comfortable with Google Adwords, Nami Media, Yahoo Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter.


• Bachelor's degree required.


• Strong familiarity with advanced Excel and PowerPoint.


• Strength in developing, delivering and analyzing top level and detailed metric reports that provides meaningful insight and can be easily digested by the entire organization.


• Experience interacting and communicating with engineering, sales and finance.


• Strong math skills and comfort level with data manipulation and analysis a must.

• Strong problem solving and ability to work under pressure and tight deadlines; ability to multi-task and prioritize projects.


• Exceptional writing, communication, and presentation skills a must.


• Team player and ability to coordinate cross-functional efforts and communications on a daily basis.


• Self motivated leader and motivator who delivers results with minimal supervision.


• Strong analytical skills and ability to translate metrics into actionable proposals.


• Talent in strongly aligning an organizations role/purpose with a company's mission and vision.


• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills at all levels.

• Competitive base and commission based on results.


• Generous benefits package.


• Accessible and open-minded leadership.


• Opportunity to work with smart people and learn a lot about one of the fastest growing industries.

Email your cover letter, resume, and salary requirements or LinkedIn profile to jobs AT pheedo.com.

Posted by Bill Flitter on December 28, 2009 3:15 PM
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RSS, Now with More Cowbell

December 16, 2008

What do you get if you combine the growing preference of online users for 'content-on-the-go' (RSS) with their appetite for video? Answer: Pheedo's new video RSS syndication service - Video Ads for Feeds.

According to eMarketer video ad spending will rise 45% in 2009 counter to the overall market conditions. The product fulfills the need to cost-effectively access a highly engaged audience that is increasingly spending more of their time consuming content away from websites. Subscribers spend on average 30 minutes per day consuming RSS-enabled content and watch nearly 3.8 hours of video online monthly.

Now marketers can leverage Pheedo's latest enhancement - RSS video content and video ad syndication platform to reach millions of users who choose to consume content via RSS. The video ads are syndicated to premium publishers' feeds including the New York Times, CBS, Huffington Post, PCWorld and hundreds of niche content feeds, communities and news readers. Universal Studios, Fox Searchlight and National Geographic are just some of the advertisers to jump on Video Ads for Feeds to reach their fragmented audience.

We continue to push RSS advertising into new territories and evolve our platform to serve the growing needs of publishers, advertisers and the community. Marketer's thirst for quality inventory to syndicate their videos translates into new revenue opportunities for Pheedo publishers.

The video ad platform integrates with our existing RSS analytics and ad serving tools to provide deep insight into user engagement and ROI. With double-digit engagement rates, advertisers have been pleased with the results.

Benefits of the new service include:

Controlled Syndication
Easily establish rules to effectively syndicate to a variety of distribution points including niche audiences.

Measure Performance and ROI
Analytics provides access to dozens of performance and behavioral reports.

Simple Deployment
Use your current video assets to get started easily.

Viral
Users can engage with the video content by sharing it with friends or bookmarking it for later viewing.

Intelligent
Video player automatically detects the end user's device and adjusts content delivery accordingly.

The chrome of the player can be customized to increase the immediate branding experience. Users can click on the chrome to be immediately directed to a destination page.

RSS had a fever and the only cure was more Cowbell.

Posted by Bill Flitter on December 16, 2008 12:00 PM
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Pheedo Chicago office makes debut in the Dark Knight

July 29, 2008

Rachel: What will you do?
Bruce Wayne: Rebuild it. Just the way it was, brick for brick.
Alfred: *Just* the way it was, sir?

Well, with one important addition...

Pictured above (seen from the "Mayors" window), and featured seven times in 'The Dark Knight' is the new Pheedo office - opened today in Gotham City (Chicago.)

Two new superheroes, Tom Kavooras and Vivian Busch, will oversee the region's efforts to deliver active readers and revenue to publishers and advertisers.

More and more advertisers are learning that their content can be consumed in a distributed fashion throughout the ecosystem of the web. For some advertisers though, the distributed content world is a scary and unfamiliar place.

Tom and Vivian are now in place with their knowledge about the new reality, deep experience with advertisers and local roots to help shine a light in the darkness.

Welcome Tom and Vivian to the Pheedo Team!

Posted by Bill Flitter on July 29, 2008 1:59 PM
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Pheedo Announces the Launch of Distributed Media Analytics for Advertisers

July 15, 2008

Today, we at Pheedo are pleased to announce a way for advertisers to effectively measure user engagement and the overall impact of their content campaigns in social networks, websites and blogs.

With content moving beyond the website into widgets, start-pages, RSS readers and social environments - advertisers want to know where and how their content is being consumed.

Pheedo, the distributed media advertising pioneer, now measures user engagement with news feeds (RSS) for advertisers distributing content through social media environments including facebook and MySpace, start-pages, widgets, lifestreaming applications and leading blogs.

The FeedPowered Analytics Dashboard(tm) provides advertisers with comprehensive intelligence about where their content is being consumed as well as a deep understanding of how the content is being consumed beyond their website.

Some of the exciting Dashboard features include:

* Active User Analysis - Track the number of feed subscribers and feed subscription growth trends.

* Content Engagement - Track the number of views and clicks on editorial items. Determine which content is most popular with your readers. Track interaction rates to social media environments like Digg, Reddit and Facebook.

* Advertising Stats - Monitor ad impressions, clicks and CTR on feed content ads.

* Social Media Distribution - Track the consumption points where subscribers are receiving and interacting with content.

* RSS Subscription Page Optimization - Page dedicated and optimized to increase RSS subscribers.

* Subscription Options - Enable readers to subscribe to RSS feeds via email. RSS/Email subscribers and actions are tracked.

* Feed Management API - Create and update settings, export data via an API.

President of Connect Direct Inc, Howard J. Sewell states, "The Pheedo platform provides a unique engagement map that enables our clients to interact with prospects, customers and partners in a more meaningful dialogue within a social media setting."

We are excited to be bringing Pheedo's technology in helping create the standard in Social Media analytics while providing advertisers a way to evaluate the ROI of distributed media.

For more information, you can read the official press release or contact Pheedo directly.

Posted by Yan Budman on July 15, 2008 3:13 PM
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Pheedo RSS Feed Stats Now In DoubleClick

February 27, 2007

Starting today, advertisers and publishers using Pheedo's RSS ad serving technology and DoubleClick to track ad performance will now be able to view Pheedo feed ad performance within the DoubleClick management interface. We worked closely with DoubleClick to solve the technical issues. Now, our joint customers will have a holistic view of their marketing efforts across all of their inventory. We will continue to integrate with other 3rd-party ad management services.

As a part of our goal to help you "do more with feeds" and make money from your RSS content, Pheedo is working to make both our in-feed and on-site ad offerings, including the new FeedPoweredâ„¢ ads, easily integrated and compatible with other feed and content management systems as well as ad management services, like DoubleClick. This DoubleClick integration is just a piece of that bigger puzzle for helping marketers work with Pheedo anytime, anywhere. Stay tuned for more.

Posted by Bill Flitter on February 27, 2007 9:16 PM
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Introducing FeedPoweredâ„¢ Ads

February 13, 2007

We started Pheedo more than three years ago with the goal of creating solutions to help people do more with RSS and make money from their RSS content. What started with a simple analytics engine evolved into our leading ad-serving technology, and today we are introducing the next step in our work to help publishers and advertisers alike get the most out of RSS content - FeedPowered Ads.

You can read about announcement specifics and reactions in our press release, on TechCrunch, BusinessWeek and right here in our own Pheedo FeedPowered video ad unit (see the right side bar below "Events"). It is a FeedPowered Video unit pulling in a YouTube RSS feed. The content is a series of videos created to explain the FeedPowered Ad platform (practice what you preach, right?) Feed readers will need to click through to the blog.

Essentially, FeedPowered ads are a platform for publishers and advertisers to move their RSS content around the web and give consumers the tools to interact and engage with that content and begin the word of mouth and viral marketing process. Today's on-site advertising generally looks to target a hard-to-find "ready-to-buy" audience that leads to a low click-through rate - FeedPowered ads reach out to a wider range of consumers and give them options other than just clicking through to a website - these include bookmarking, tagging, emailing and subscribing to the feed.

Advertisers such as Coke, Ford and other big name brands are creating a huge amount of content today and it resides primarily on their websites. FeedPowered Ads give marketers a way to free this content from their site and distribute it around the web, extend their marketing reach, and target new sets of potential customers.

Opera Software, one of the early testers of FeedPowered Ads has gained more than 1,000 new subscribers to its RSS feeds from within the new ad unit and garnered click-through rates approaching 10% on their FeedPowered Ads.

All you need to start is a logo and a feed. The ads can be served on our network, your network or through your favorite ad server, and fully tracked throughout the life of your campaigns.

We think this is a big step in online advertising, and a testament to the power of RSS. If you'd like to get started, sign-up here.

Posted by Bill Flitter on February 13, 2007 3:15 PM
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Pheed Read #4 - RSS & The Automotive Industry

December 20, 2006

Executive Summary
The Pheed Read is back, and this time out we’re taking a different approach to our data. In Pheed Read #3, we discussed the issue of full text feeds vs. summary feeds and observed user behavior on clicking through from feeds to websites. Full and summary feeds garnered basically the same click through rates, and 90% percent of readers consumed feed content within their RSS aggregators regardless of the length of the feed item – conclusion being, RSS users are not visiting websites often, and should be marketed to at the feed level.

This time out, in Pheed Read #4, we will be analyzing the data from a specific Pheedo content channel – the automotive category. RSS is emerging as one of the most targeted online mediums for advertisers and the analysis of a single category demonstrates that each content category and its associated readership are different, and marketing strategies should be customized to reach the intended audience. On to the numbers and analysis.

Key Pheed Read Findings Include:

• Feed reader market share statistics show drastic differences from other categories
• Headline-only feeds garner twice the CTR of summary feeds
• Auto category shows high rate of growth month over month and in Q4 of 2006, outpacing all other feed categories
• Most auto publishers offer headline and summary feeds
• Auto-enthusiasts are a financially diverse group
• More than three-quarters of auto category consumers are over the age of 35

Headline Feeds vs. Summary Feeds
Summary feeds make up 63% of automotive feeds in the Pheedo network, while the remainder consists of headline feeds. Unlike other categories in the Pheedo Network (which include entertainment, technology and travel, among others), there are no automotive content publishers that offer full-text feeds. To build on previous Pheed Read reports, we analyzed the click through rates (CTR) on the content (clicking through to the website) for each of these feed formats, within the automotive content channel:

• Headline feeds: 33% CTR on content
• Summary feeds: 15% CTR on content

Headline feeds garner more than twice the CTR of summary feeds. In Pheed Read #3, we found that about 90% of readers of full and summary feeds stay within the aggregator and do not click through to the website. The auto category data shows a departure from previous, broad based research and illustrates clearly that when headline feeds are offered to consumers, the content click through rate is significantly higher indicating that less people stay within their aggregator.  However, the feed offering is only one element in the equation leading to higher CTR, as we’ll see next in the discussion on feed reader preferences.

Feed reader market share is a commonly tracked statistic in the RSS market, and Pheedo has tracked feed reader market share data since issuing Pheed Read #1, showing consistent results across the board in past analyses. Bloglines has taken top honors in prior reports with around 30% of the market followed by Yahoo! with about 15%.

A key aspect of feed reader preference that marketers and publishers should consider is the format in which each reader presents feeds – each RSS reader presents feeds slightly differently, impacting how publishers and marketers should format their content. Overall, our findings in the automotive channel were pretty surprising and a marked departure from past reports, showing that each content category impacts behavior, and that trends cannot necessarily be applied across RSS readership in general, without also considering the flavor of the content:

Yahoo! takes the leadership position with more than half of the market share with Firefox coming in second at 18%. Bloglines drops significantly with just 7% of the market.

While the feed aggregator type analysis is certainly not the end of the story on the high CTR on headline-only feeds that we discussed earlier, it is a key piece of the puzzle. The first two reader types in our analysis, the Yahoo! and Firefox readers (pre-Firefox 2.0, which renders feeds differently) display only the feed headline in their default state, which naturally leads to a higher CTR as readers MUST click through the headline to obtain additional content. 

Automotive Channel Growth vs. RSS Feed Growth
Impressions in the auto category show a growth rate of 38% month over month growth. This is a rapidly growing category. From July to November 2006, the total impression growth of the auto category has grown more than 500% with the last quarter of 2006 showing the highest rates of growth.

Automotive Channel Demographics
We broke down the auto category by several demographics including age, gender and household income. While there is data out there that indicates these statistics for RSS in general, it is valuable to break out the auto vertical as the results (as with feed reader market share) do vary from general RSS statistics.

Age: more than 75% of auto category consumers are over the age of 35. The “coveted” 18 to 24 year old demographic is not the sweet spot when it comes to marketing in auto focused RSS feeds. They make up only 3% of the total audience:

Gender: male readers represent close to two-thirds of the auto category audience:

Household income data: Each demographic other than the $150,000+ group holds a roughly equal share in auto category readership (~20%). Financially, auto enthusiasts are a diverse group:

The Car Connection Story
One of the auto category publishers included in the Pheed Read report data is The Car Connection, an award-winning automotive site offering a complete editorial source for news and reviews, spy shots and shopping guides, tips and expert advice.

When the publishers of The Car Connection first heard about RSS integration into Internet Explorer 7 and the resulting mass audience that would be exposed to the medium, they decided to ramp up RSS efforts and offer their content to readers via feeds. Paul Eisenstein, publisher of The Car Connection, says that the site has seen significant growth in their RSS feeds, and that it is the fastest growing content delivery method for The Car Connection.

The Car Connection offers headline feeds and a short one-line description of the article in the body of the feed. Advertisements are presented as a standalone item in the feed. The Car Connection formats their feeds to drive people to The Car Connection website, but also markets within the feed, to reach those consumers who stay in the aggregator, and monetize their content at the feed level. The Car Connection takes a hybrid approach to their feeds by using it as both a way to drive more traffic to their site and as a monetization tool.

In 2007, The Car Connection plans to increase its RSS publishing efforts and engage in new programs to increase RSS readership and monetize RSS content.

Third Party Data
To add perspective and insight to our home-grown Pheedo data, we’ve taken a glance at recent findings from other sources. A few highlights:

• Online advertising spending continues to grow at a fast clip: U.S. online advertising spending is expected to reach a record-setting $16.7 billion this year, up from $12.5 billion last year, according to online marketing analyst group eMarketer.
• Online video advertising spend is on a rapid upswing. According to a survey from the American Advertising Federation, more than half (53%) of the 168 respondents said they expect 20% or more of their TV advertising budgets to shift into online video by 2010.
• eMarketer also predicts that automotive spending will account for 15 percent of online ad dollars in 2007, to the tune of $2.7 billion.
• Automotive publishers are seeing a high demand for web ad inventory: according to Kevin Considine, vp of national sales for Cars.com [as reported by MediaWeek’s Mike Shields, 12/4/06], close to 88 percent of Cars.com inventory is sold out for next year, with most brands increasing their budgets by anywhere from 20 percent to 100 percent.
• PQ Media Alternative Media Research Series reports that spending on blog, podcast and RSS advertising is projected to climb another 144.9% in 2006 to $49.8 million.

It's no secret that online advertising is on the rise, and that marketers are looking for new mediums to tap to reach new audiences. Online publishers focused on producing automotive-related content are seeing some of the fastest growth with inventory at sites such as Cars.com almost sold out for all of next year. New online, social mediums such as RSS, blogs present a new medium for these advertisers looking to expand their advertising reach. And from the data presented above, it appears we will start to see marketers spending more and more in these areas.

Conclusions
The auto category is a fast growing online content channel, and as auto manufacturers shift more and more ad dollars to online media, RSS is taking a large chunk of new media marketing efforts.

The data shows that different categories’ readers interact with RSS feeds differently, which presents a challenge to marketers trying to make a broad ad buy across several categories, but also demonstrates the highly targeted nature of RSS feeds. The intricacies of RSS usage should not be seen as barriers, because they in fact give more insight to marketers on who their audience is, and how to target them.

Based on the Pheedo data and findings from across the field of marketing research, we can offer the following take-aways:

1. Automotive web sites should increase their available inventory in high growth areas (RSS) as brands shift dollars online in 2007;
2. RSS/Blogs and social media in general represent new opportunities for the auto industry;
3. Overall RSS usage amongst Auto enthusiasts is growing steadily;
4. Trends in video and rich media highlight additional areas for growth in syndicated content channels as consumers’ desire for RSS-fed information and affinity for online video converge.

Download a PDF of Pheedo's Pheed Read #4 here

The official press release on the latest Pheed Read is here.

Posted by Bill Flitter on December 20, 2006 12:12 PM
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Feed Powered Advertising

November 19, 2006

Picture this: An ad unit that's easy to create, changes dynamically with RSS, and increases subscriptions to your RSS feeds...

We've been holding our tongues at Pheedo to chime in on our work on what folks are calling feed powered advertising. Initial iterations of this concept (by TechMeme and Federated Media for example) use blog posts as the content for advertising. It's a great idea, and it's just the start. At Pheedo, we've been developing a similar ad format. We've made it scalable by leveraging our existing technology. That means any advertiser with an RSS feed can use it. More importantly, it will be available to all publishers in our network very shortly. We launched a preliminary, basic version with PRWeb some time ago and have been working on further enhancements for some time as the interest in RSS from all corners heats up.

Here's a glimpse into the feed powered ad solution we've been testing over the past few weeks on a number of blogs and sites in the Pheedo network.

Why is this different? First off, let's look at the state of RSS advertising and divide it into two different types:

1. In-Feed Advertising
2. RSS Powered Advertising

Pheedo has been doing "in-feed" advertising for our clients for more than two years now, and while RSS adoption is growing, in-feed advertising is just the beginning of the overall RSS marketing story. The available in-feed inventory still only represents a small percentage of online inventory. But RSS content doesn't need to be limited to feeds - it can be used as a dynamic marketing message, which leads us to RSS feed powered advertising.

This is conversational advertising at its best, a topic that's been near and dear to me since we started Pheedo. It's about letting marketers use RSS content in a new way and 'move' that content to engage customers and attract new subscribers.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. We are currently testing our feed powered platform with several top brands and we'll keep you posted over the coming weeks and months. If you would like to take part in our beta testing, and promote your content and grow feed subscribers, contact us.

Posted by Bill Flitter on November 19, 2006 9:00 PM
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Pheedo and Simplefeed Get Together

September 27, 2006

This week Pheedo partnered with SimpleFeed to combine our RSS advertising sales and feed marketing services with SimpleFeed's RSS publishing and analytics offerings. We are excited about working closely with SimpleFeed and can now offer our publishers and advertisers a more comprehensive suite of RSS marketing services that gives a number of great advantages:

Advantage #1: Increased Traffic
SimpleFeed's "templated" feeds stand out from the competition, encouraging opens and click throughs by including multiple links and promotional elements. Using their checkbox technology, subscribers get personalized, relevant content and stay subscribed. Each subscriber has their own URL so publishers can monitor RSS subscribe and unsubscribe rates as well as individual content interests. Pheedo's feed marketing services complement these services by growing publishers' overall feed readership.
The result: More subscribers clicking through more often to the web site.

Advantage #2: RSS Monetization
In typical RSS implementations, each subscriber receives the same ad, but with Pheedo's ad serving, which we'll now integrate with SimpleFeed's unique URL technology, counts every subscriber feed content view as a unique advertising opportunity, allowing for better ad rotation, personalization and frequency capping.
The result: Increased inventory and CPM.

Advantage #3: No IT Resources Required
As more site visitors adopt RSS and publishers scale RSS publishing across multiple properties, RSS will increasingly consume IT time and infrastructure. Pheedo and SimpleFeed provide hosted services that require no IT resources so publishers can easily deploy new sites or change their RSS button link and increase traffic and revenue immediately.
The result: Low cost of implementation and maintenance.

Advantage #4: Increased Publisher Network Size
SimpleFeed publishers are now members of the Pheedo Ad Network. Advertisers now have access to more on-site and RSS ad inventory across a large number of content categories.
The result: More options for advertisers and possibility for larger ad buys

Stay tuned for more news and features from the team of Pheedo and SimpleFeed.

Posted on September 27, 2006 12:04 PM
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Pheed Read #3 - RSS Feeds Provide Untapped Advertising Audience

May 16, 2006

It's been a few months since our last Pheedo Pheed Read report! For those of you who've been watching, the RSS marketplace has grown and matured in just a few short months.

As usual, there's lots of data to share in this Pheed Read. We'll cover a few highlights here, but if you're interested in the full details, please download the Pheed Read Spring 2006 Report here.

Full-Text Feeds and Summary Feeds Garner Similar Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Summary feeds (full content not shown in the feed item) average at 12% CTR while full-text feeds average 10% CTR. The report states that the median CTR for full-text feeds remains at 10% while summary feeds drop to 8% CTR due to extremely high CTR rates in certain categories and individual feeds.

Consumers Remaining Within Aggregator / News Reader Environment To View RSS Content
90% of RSS consumers opt to read the feed content entirely in the aggregator environment, regardless whether they are viewing full or partial feeds. This presents a tremendous opportunity to monetize the feed content at the feed reader or aggregator point of consumption.

Standalone Ads Continue to Outperform Inline Ads

Holding true to the December 2005 "Pheed Read," standalone RSS ads continue to outperform inline ads. Standalone ads average a 2.76% CTR while inline ads average .45%.

We took another look at the click-through rate of various modes of RSS ad placement. We noticed some significant fluctuation from the last report, as evidenced in the chart below.

The "Pheed Read" is released quarterly by Pheedo and details trends in RSS usage. In addition to the �Pheed Read,� Pheedo provides analytics capabilities that allow publishers to view detailed feed usage information about their feeds.

For a complete PDF copy of the Pheedo Pheed Read, click here to download.

Check out the press release here.

Posted on May 16, 2006 3:23 PM
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ad:tech, Ads for Feeds and the Great Pheed Feed

May 1, 2006

Last week was a busy one at Pheedo! We had a great time at Ad-Tech and ended the conference on a high note at the RSS Industry Roundtable dinner.

In case you missed it, we released Pheedo Ads for Feeds on Wednesday at the conference too! Ads for Feeds finally lets anyone with RSS feeds insert Pheedo ads and use our analytics services to help monetize and optimize their content without changing the feed URL. All you have to do it past a small piece of code into your RSS feed and away you go! This works right out of the box with Wordpress, Typepad and Moveable Type, and it is easy to customize it to work with most other content management systems.

Posted on May 1, 2006 8:31 AM
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Catch Pheedo at Ad:tech - Look For the Blue Shirts!

April 20, 2006

Pheedo's going to Ad:tech in San Francisco on April 26th and 27th. If you're in the area, drop by our booth, #5788.

Look for the guys in the blue shirts. They're friendly, helpful and love to talk blogs & RSS advertising.

If you want to schedule a meet up at the event, just email bill at pheedo.com to setup a time!

See you all at Ad:tech!

Posted on April 20, 2006 1:49 PM
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IT Veteran to Join Pheedo

January 9, 2006

We have a new addition to the team. We are proud to announce that Arnon Moscona will be joining our team as Vice President of Engineering. Arnon brings more than 15 years of engineering experience to help guide the development of new innovative RSS advertising products.

Prior, Arnon served as director of engineering at NexTag, the largest online comparison-shopping site, managing several different areas of development during his tenure with the company, including search engine optimization and advertising management engineering.

We are excited to have Arnon lead our technology development. He has already made a big impact in several new innovative product initiatives that will be launching first quarter. Expect great things from Pheedo in the coming year.

Posted by Bill Flitter on January 9, 2006 8:32 AM
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Pheed Read #2 - Standalone RSS Ads Perform, Ad-to-Post Ratios Clarified

December 14, 2005

A few months ago, Pheedo released our first Pheed Read report on the state of RSS advertising, exposing some of the aggregate data we'd been collecting from within our RSS and weblog advertising network. As promised, we're going to continue to do these Pheed Read reports on at least a quarterly basis

A few things have changed since the last Pheed Read, but in many instances the data recorded this time around significantly reinforces what we've been saying all along about how effective RSS and weblog advertising can be.

So, let's get to the findings!

Our first bit of insight is Standalone RSS ads vs. Inline RSS ads. We've had some question on what these ads look like in the context of a feed, so have a look at the images below if you're looking for a graphical representation on what a Standalone ad looks like vs. an Inline, or 'embedded ad', please see these two examples.

Inline Ad Placement

Standalone Ad Placement

Standalone RSS ads are far more successful than inline ads.
A standalone RSS ad (the entire post is the advertisement) generates, on average, a 7.99% click-through rate - over nine times more clicks than an inline RSS ad (an advertisement within a publisher's post).

We often get questions about the 'optimal' ad insertion or ad display frequency. Optimal meaning, "what will get me the greatest click-through?" Over the past quarter, we've payed special attention to this metric and our findings may surprise you.

Placing RSS ads in every other post yields the highest percentage of click throughs.
When ads are placed in every other feed post, users clicked on the ad 3.24% of the time. This is over three times more effective than placing an advertisement in every post in a feed, where the CTR is 1.04%. While this is impressive, it's also important to note that placing one ad to every six posts is also a highly effective ratio.

There are a number of other salient points in the Pheed Read report that marketers and content publishers should take note of.

RSS content CTR varies significantly based on day of the week.
Contrary to earlier "Pheed Read" data which showed peak CTR on Tuesday, Monday and Saturday have emerged as the days with the highest CTR while Thursday and Friday show the lowest percentage.

Mid-week readership of RSS feeds highest.
Consistent with the previous "Pheed Read" report, RSS readership rises steadily at the beginning of the week, peaking on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then declines through the weekend. Average weekend readership is over 67% lower than average weekday readership.

RSS ads are outperforming similar Web ads.
With traditional and rich-media online ads garnering CTR ranging from .20% to 1.17% CTR, according to a report by DoubleClick, standalone RSS ads, with an average CTR of 7.99%, are outperforming traditional online ads by a wide margin.

Bloglines leads RSS readers in market share. **Newsgator family of readers close second**
Bloglines is the most used RSS reader among Pheedo publisher subscribers, consistent with previous "Pheed Read" data. With 34% penetration, Bloglines overshadows Yahoo, NetNewsWire and Mozilla - each with about 14% reader penetration. When you combine the NewsGator family of readers - NewsGator, NG online, FeedDemon, NG EnterpriseServer and NetNewsWire, they come in at right around 20%.

Posted on December 14, 2005 9:27 AM
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Analyze This - Pheedo RSS Analytics Service

November 21, 2005

The Pheedo RSS Analytics toolset that we released last week has caught the eye of plenty of publications around the industry.

Despite the great coverage, there are always a few more quesstions to answer, and we're more than happy to oblige with answers. Questions like - "Well, what does it look like?" To answer a few of the inquiries, we gave Rok Hrastnik a peak behind the scenes and a couple of exclusive screen shots (see below). Thanks Rok, for the ink.

Come to think of it, if you really want to see the service in action, try it out! You can sign up for the Pheedo RSS Analytics service over here and have an opportunity to start monetizing your feeds from day 1! We're working hard to bring you a great analytics service but we're working just as hard to help you monetize your RSS content by pairing the best advertisers with the best publishers in the Pheedo RSS ad network.

Posted on November 21, 2005 1:17 PM
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ValueClick Acquisition of Fastclick

August 4, 2005

UPDATE: Finally (Aug 11) the ValueClick/Fastclick aquisition news hits mainstream media. I was getting a big nervous and questioning the reliability of the source.

According to reliable sources, ValueClick (Nasdaq: VCLK) today acquired Fastclick, another online advertising company, for a yet undisclosed sum. This is particularly interesting news in light of Fastclick's own less than stellar IPO in March of 2005, raising about about $68 million, in after having been raised the most capital in VC funds in 2004. This makes ValueClick the undisputed heavyweight in the online advertising network space.

UPDATE: ValueClick to Buy Fastclick for Stock (AP)

Posted on August 4, 2005 7:17 PM
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"Pheed Read" No. 1 - RSS Usage Revealed.

July 21, 2005

Pheedo decided to take a peek under the hood at some of the RSS advertiser and publisher data that we’ve been collecting. While not much has been published yet on RSS advertising statistics, we’d like to share a few insights for our publishers that we’re seeing from our reporting tools. Going forward, we’ll be more formally packaging our data and insight into a series of what we’re calling “Pheed Read” reports. Our initial insights follow.

Tuesday is the most active day in RSS; Saturday least active.

- Our initial observations of the data point to Tuesday being the most active day for viewership, feed retrieval and click-throughs.

- Click through rate (CTR) differs by over 70 percent from Tuesday, the most active day for RSS, to Saturday, the least active. Feed retrieval (when a user’s feed reader fetches the RSS feed) is a bit more consistent with a 47 percent swing between the two days.

- The second best day for all of the aforementioned metrics is Wednesday, showing an average 22 percent differential from Tuesday.

The “morning scanners” view most content; late night readers click through more.

- CTR fluctuates from 7 to 11 percent depending on the hour of the day that users are consuming the content. It is interesting to note that CTR peaks in the late night daypart hours and late in the afternoon during the daytime daypart hours.

- The initial CTR reports surprised us. Considering that CTR on PPC marketing is around 7 percent for a first rank item, with email and banner advertising trailing that number, a high CTR for RSS caught us off guard. Look for a deep dive into the CTR of RSS feeds and ads in a future report. Further, CTR is made up of two factors: impressions and click-throughs. Impression calculation does not take into account off-line viewing of feeds, which could potentially skew impression data.

- Viewership of RSS feeds follows a different trend. There is a significant spike in RSS readership during the early morning daypart, which tails off as the day goes on. We attribute this to the ‘scanning’ behavior of RSS consumers, whereby they read the volume of the content published overnight and in the morning immediately upon arriving to work or logging on each day. There is another spike in the late night. According the Online Publishers Association (OPA,) the typical reader during this late night daypart is the tech-savvy 18 to 24 year old reading from home.

Led by Bloglines, 70 percent of Pheedo managed feeds are read by only five aggregators.

- Consistent with other RSS aggregator market share reports on the Internet, Pheedo is seeing Bloglines atop our feed reader statistics, followed by Firefox, Thunderbird, NewsGator and Sharpreader. In aggregate, these readers are used by almost 70 percent of people subscribing to Pheedo managed RSS content.

RSS is growing up; Reader data illustrates shift from early adopters to mainstream.

- One interesting point to note is that the NetNewsWire aggregator for the Mac is no where in our top 5 aggregators, whereas it was number two in FeedBurner’s statistics. We attribute this to two factors. First, RSS is growing up. Charles Smith pointed out earlier this year that as RSS adoption moves mainstream, which is comprised mainly of Windows computers, we’ll see NetNewsWire’s share migrate to the space that is typically occupied by the Safari browser in most web analytics reports, about 1 to 2 percent. Secondly, the sample that we derived these stats from was skewed toward the technology category, which caters in large part to the Wintel market segment.

Posted by Bill Flitter on July 21, 2005 10:21 AM
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Pheedo to launch RSS and Weblog Advertising Network in Japan

May 17, 2005

Sorry for the silence on the blog lately. My travel schedule has been brutal and we are working hard to add new benefits to the Pheedo service. The first of which I am excited to discuss.

We have partnered with Japanese marketing firm Transcosmos and their Tokyo-based subsidiary, AD2 to help our advertisers expand their reach outside the borders of the US. We plan to license our RSS ad-serving technology to Transcosmos in the Japanese market. AD2 will use our technology to build Japan’s first RSS advertising network which is planned to launch in July 2005.

We are very pleased to be working with Transcosmos and AD2. By combining Pheedo’s fully-integrated RSS and weblog advertising platform with AD2’s marketing expertise, we are poised to capitalize on the explosive growth of RSS and weblogs in Japan.

Posted by Bill Flitter on May 17, 2005 10:33 PM
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Traffic Exchange Service Problems

March 3, 2005

We are doing a few tweaks to the database that powers the free Traffic Exchange. This has resulted in the ad code displaying incorrectly on a few of our member's blogs. This only pertains to the traffic exchange service. It should be fixed soon. We will post updates as they happen. We apologize for the inconvenience.

***UPDATE***
Problem fixed. Thank you for your patience.

Posted by Bill Flitter on March 3, 2005 8:39 PM
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Pheedo Acquires Blogsnob

September 28, 2004

We've been a quiet around here lately. Very few posts this month. Well, it is not because we're relaxing. Quite the opposite actually.

We have been very busy growing our business and making some key acquisitions. We'll be making an official announcement to the press tomorrow but we wanted our readers to be the first to know.

I am proud to announce we have acquired Blogsnob. Blogsnob is an ad exchange program for bloggers. With over 4k participating blogs (and growing every day), it makes for a lively community covering topics from politics to business to sports to health and much, much more. Most importantly, Blogsnob members can he assured; we are committed to keeping the service free and only making it better.

This is exciting news for several reasons. First, Adam Kalsey will be joining Pheedo as our CTO. An outstanding technologist and business person, Adam has been the mastermind behind BlogSnob over the last year. We are extremely pleased to have him on our executive team.

We are now working on many new features to grow BlogSnob as well as our existing RSS Advertising tools. Look for further announcements there in the near future. The first change we are implementing is a name change. The new name for the blog exchange is the SimpleAd Exchange. This should be live in October.

With the excitement around blog advertising, the acquisition allows us to better serve our existing customers and provide them access to over 4k active decision makers and market influencers, and millions of readers. The Pheedo SimpleAd platform will provide advertising agencies and marketers a one-stop solution across blogs and content feeds including Atom and RSS. As a result, the construction, delivery and tracking of an entire advertising campaign and content feed will be possible from a single interface.

Additionally, to help guide this ship, we've added a few advisors to our board. The first is Chris Pirillo from Lockergnome. Always exciting, never boring Pirillo will make sure we have 'phun', stay focused, and help us understand the mind of a publisher. Chris brings the perspective of a long time blogger and publisher. He adds, "Every link counts - which is why, especially as a free service, Blogsnob is invaluable."

We also welcome to our board, Dave Nielson from PayPal/eBay. Dave is most famous for his marriage proposal to his fiancé ( a little joke, but a true story). Dave, an accomplished author and entrepreneur, recently wrote a book for the PayPal's Developer Network. In every printed copy of the book he included a marriage proposal to his then girlfriend. Now that takes guts! We like that around here. Dave will guide us as we create a developer network as well as bring a technology/business slant.

We are excited about the future of Pheedo. Please help us welcome Adam, the Blogsnob team, Chris and Dave.

Posted by Bill Flitter on September 28, 2004 5:08 PM
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Free Subscription - 1to1 Magazine

June 2, 2004

Put down your laptop, grab a cup of coffee and brush up on your CRM skills with a FREE subscription to 1to1 Magazine. The Peppers & Rogers Group knows a thing or two about one-to-one marketing. Learn from the experts. Open to all US readers of the Pheedo weblog.

Posted by Bill Flitter on June 2, 2004 10:16 PM
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Kalsey Consulting and Pheedo launch "How to Blog."

May 15, 2004

Kalsey Consulting and Pheedo are pleased to announce a joint initiative called "How to Blog." The resource section located on their respective weblogs is devoted to help business build successful weblogs. You will find lots of examples of great business blogs. Additionally, You will learn blogging etiquette, how to market your blog, how to get started and much more. Have specific question? We'd be happy to answer it. Want to contribute? Let us know.

Posted by Bill Flitter on May 15, 2004 5:15 AM
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PHEEDO SECURES SERIES A FINANCING

May 4, 2004

Pheedo, the first advertising network and ad delivery platform for RSS and ATOM publishers, secures seed investment from Fastlane Ventures.

Continue reading "PHEEDO SECURES SERIES A FINANCING" »

Posted by Bill Flitter on May 4, 2004 11:11 AM
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