FeedBurner Networks is a service (currently in beta), that encourages discoverability and self-promotion of your feed content.
While we’d like to think we’re pretty organized and we know your feeds pretty well, we talked it over amongst ourselves and decided that the collective “you” are much better equipped to assemble yourselves into groups or “networks” of feed producers who publish similar content. We also think it’s your right to do so. FeedBurner Networks is our way of facilitating this self-organizing process.
This service benefits publishers, subscribers and even advertisers by increasing discoverability of feed-driven content. Publishers benefit by banding together to increase exposure and take advantage of cross-promotional opportunities. Subscribers benefit by finding more content that interests them and advertisers benefit with increased targeting capability and exposure to content that may have been difficult to otherwise find.
FeedBurner Networks empowers publishers to create their own communities. This kind of freedom to organize can be a powerful way for publishers to leverage the power of many to increase their reach online, attract more subscribers and potentially more advertising opportunities, if they so choose.
Every participating publisher has an equal opportunity to appear on a network home page that is comprised of the most recent headlines from the collective group (view a sample network home page). We encourage publishers to brand their network with a descriptive and compelling name and even include a logo. FeedBurner provides a number of promotional tools to help participants get the word out including a network badge, chicklets and FeedBurner’s popular BuzzBoost service. In addition, publishers who are invited to join a network will have the opportunity to submit their feed to FeedBurner’s growing advertising network, FAN.
Naming issues aside (forgive us, we’re in beta), these two offerings are very different. The FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN) is a service for publishers to monetize their content by including advertisements in their feeds or on their blogs and sites. At this time, participation in FAN is by invitation only since we are still building out the platform and managing advertising demand against publisher supply. Joining a network can fast-track an application to FAN. Participants in FeedBurner Networks are under no obligation to advertise, though most choose to do so. These two offerings happily co-exist.
There is no cost to create or join a FeedBurner Network.
FeedBurner likes to think of itself as a non-prohibitive type of company. There are no exclusivity requirements associated with this service.
Since we all agree that you know yourselves better than we could ever possibly hope to, FeedBurner Networks are managed by FeedBurner publishers. Power to the people, we say! Check out the Network Coordinator FAQ for more on that.
We’re planning improvements and feature additions over the next few months. Ultimately, the plan is to open the service to any publisher’s feed that is managed by FeedBurner (yes, all 604,533 of them). We will post to our company blog, Burning Questions, when updates are available.
No problem. Stop by the FeedBurner Help Group and we’ll do our best to find an answer.