Are Your Feedburner FAN Ads Suffering?

February 7th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under

Does anyone else use the Feedburner FAN Advertising network? I’ve been a member for a while, and I’m getting fewer and fewer ads being displayed each month with a corresponding fall in income.

What really surprised me was the latest Feedburner ad I had to approve. It had been a while since I’d had a new campaign (I’ve got 5 running at the moment, which is the lowest I think since I joined Feedburner’s FAN network) so I eagerly clicked on the link only to find that the ad only paid $1 CPM, or $0.70 after feedburners allocation.

I’ve never had a Feedburner ad so low. The lowest I’ve had from Feedburner before I think was $5 Gross CPM. It made me think, are Feedburner struggling to sell ads in general or is my experience isolated? How are they doing on your blog in terms of performance?

If I was an advertiser I probably wouldn’t advertise on FAN because FAN doesn’t stipulate where bloggers have to place their ads, whcih results in many bloggers putting their ads at the bottom of pages.

Overall, I’m having a very bad revenue week. Even despite being ‘dugg’, I’ve still had the same average number of clicks per day because of one of my Hard Drives failing, which made it virtually impossible for pages to load. What has been really gutting though is that that CPC for those clicks that I did manage to get were over double my usual daily rates, so if all those digg users had been able to access my site who knows how much I would have made?

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About the Author

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Everton is based in London and has worked in the internet and mobile space for over ten years now, and before that worked in corporate strategy and consulting. He has a degree in Economics from Cambridge University, and currently runs the Portal and online operations for one of the largest ISPs in the UK. He also writes for Windows 7 News.

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There Are 10 Responses So Far. »

  1. #1

    Comment by Martin on 7 February 2007:

    As you know I had problems with them since I activated the ads, they only show ads for 50-100 impressions per day which is not that much..

  2. #2

    Comment by Everton on 7 February 2007:

    I used to have a fill rate of around 60%, but now it’s under 10% I think so not only am I getting poor CPMs but poor fill rates as well

  3. #3

    Comment by Thilak on 7 February 2007:

    Yup, I felt the same. That’s why I placed FAN at the bottom of each post.

  4. #4

    Comment by Rick Klau on 7 February 2007:

    (Apologies if this is a duplicate; I tried post earlier and got a WP database error. –Rick)

    Hi -

    Thanks for raising this issue. As you may know, we have both a self-serve ad network as well as a staffed sales team selling ads to brand advertisers, agencies and the like. The ad you’re referring to came in through our self-serve interface: it’s entirely up to advertisers what to spend and how widely or narrowly to target the ad.

    It should be noted that you’re under no obligation to approve ads like these - indeed, that level of publisher control over your ads is one advantage of using FeedBurner: you don’t run ads you don’t like (whether due to the creative, the economics, or something else entirely).

    Regarding sell-through, we saw an expected dip in ads from December to January, and have seen a pick-up in supply since mid- to late-January. I say “expected” because the vast majority of ads running across our network are brand ads (as opposed to transactional CPC ads). January tends to be a slow month for brand marketing budgets. Things are picking up, but some seasonality is to be expected.

    Finally, on the revenue angle: we want to see you make as much money as possible. :) We’ve added a number of people to our sales team in the past couple of months, and are getting more aggressive in marketing FAN to potential advertisers. We’ve already seen some great results from both of those efforts, but will continue to invest heavily there to ensure that advertisers turn to us when they want to reach a compelling audience.

    Sorry for the length of this comment - but I wanted to make sure to address each of your points. We’re always open to feedback, and appreciate it when our publishers raises questions like this so we can provide some background for where things are at.

    Keep in touch,

    Rick

    —-
    Rick Klau
    VP, Publisher Services
    FeedBurner
    rickk@feedburner.com
    312.756.0022 x2012
    cell: 630.362.8911
    AIM/Y!/Skype: RickKlau

  5. #5

    Comment by Everton on 7 February 2007:

    Thanks Rick.

    I accepted the $1 ad as I decided it was better to have something showing, rather than nothing at all. Can I ask a question about how you sell ads? Do you sell campaigns and then decide which blogs will display the ads, and how many imps each or do advertisers choose each blog themselves?

    If it’s the former, then how do you ensure that everyone gets their fair share, rather than the big blogs hogging all the campaigns?

  6. #6

    Comment by Rick Klau on 7 February 2007:

    Everton -

    Sites that participate in FAN are associated with one or more channels; advertisers select channels that are tailored to their desired audience. Advertisers cannot select specific sites (nor can they exclude sites from a channel).

    As for ensuring everyone gets their fair share, our ad server is built to distribute impressions evenly throughout the day and over the life of the campaign. As it sees an impression request, it determines whether there are campaigns associated with the channel that the request originated at, and then determines whether those campaigns have met their impression threshold for that time of day. (In certain cases, ads are geo-targeted as well, so the location of the individual generating the ad request is taken into account as well.)

    Obviously, higher-trafficked sites will generate more impression requests. But you will see a proportional number of impressions relative to the total number of impressions in the channel. (In other words, if you represent 1% of the traffic in the computing & technology channel, you’ll generally see somewhere around 1% of the total impressions delivered in that channel in a given month, and 1% of the revenues from those campaigns.)

    Hope that helps,

    Rick

  7. #7

    Comment by Everton on 7 February 2007:

    cool that makes sense and sounds very fair

  8. #8

    Comment by Everton on 1 March 2007:

    Hi Rick

    We’ve been comparing earnings on this post. Although I have more traffic than Thilak, I’m making less even though you seem to indicate that impressions are shared equally.

    Is this because of ad positioning leading to a lower CPM or am I losing out on geo-targetted ads because of my .co.uk address?

  9. #9

    Comment by Rick Klau on 1 March 2007:

    Hi Everton -

    Ad positioning does not impact CPMs; we had a number of geo-targeted campaigns that ran in February (several with high CPMs). The geo-targeting doesn’t pay attention to your .co.uk address, it’s all about where your visitors are from - if the majority of your audience was in New York, you’d be fine.

    Hope that helps,

    Rick

  10. #10

    Comment by Everton on 1 March 2007:

    thanks for the reply. One final question? How many channels can a site belong to? I looked at your channels and I’m relevant to 3 or 4, so I fired off an email asking to be added to those channels.

    If you guys approve this move, will it mean more ads and a better fill rate?

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