Astounding how many writers/bloggers do not have a plan on how to reach those goals.

But Tyme, I don’t need a business plan…

Yes, I know. It is commonly advised not to have a business plan. That’s unwise and unrealistic. I rarely write a formalized business plan for my clients (usually only for bank approval of a loan or for the board) but I always recommend having a plan. However, there is a trick to having a solid plan that, unfortunately, most people can’t do efficiently enough to compete. In my experience, the more I do this, the more it comes naturally, to the point I don’t need to write anything down. It seems like I do not have a “business plan” when in truth, I do.

Let’s put the “not needing a plan” thing in perspective. When you go out on your first date, do you wing it or do you decide when the two of you are going to meet, where you are going to go, plan your schedule so you can go, have an estimate on how long you’ll be out on the date, have an expectation for the date, and make sure you have transportation? I could make the list longer, like picking out what to wear. Whether you write something down or not, there is a plan in place. Does it make sense you’d plan a date more than your business?

The smart plan

As I stated above, a blogger that wants to make money from their blog has at least one main goal and one sub-goal. Realistically, one has to have a solid idea on how to receive steady traffic in their niche to be able to optimally monetize the blog. Think about that. Digg, Reddit, etc. traffic does not monetize well (but can be very expensive with server fees) because they come, view an article and leave. The traffic one wants to monetize a blog (optimally) is when the advertiser will get a return on their investment. Meaning, people will click on the ads and purchase the product because the products is in sync with the blog.

How one goes about this depends on the topic or niche the writer/blogger is covering with the blog. Thinking there is one way that will work across any type of blog is unrealistic. Having an idea on the type of content the blog wants to publish (text, audio, video or a mix of all three), the publishing schedule, quality guidelines on content…these are all things that need to be decided to effectively compete with the competition.

You’re competing for ad-dollars. Advertisers don’t grow on trees. There is a limited amount of advertisers in each niche/genre so it would be best to realize that unless you create new advertisers, you’d have to pull current advertisers from the competition. Some kind of plan is needed to figure out how your site will provide advertisers more return on their investment.

There are other ways to monetize a site however, unless the blog converts people or companies to pay more than they are currently, the reality is pulling the attention these companies or people have in the competition and focusing it on you.

Of course, there is another option: using the blog as a tool to make money. To do that, one would have to have a plan wouldn’t they? Each entry would have to be geared towards the goal of helping the writer make money outside of the blog.

It is hard to escape needing a plan.

The real deal

The key to having a solid business plan is the wisdom in knowing when it is time to change things in the plan. Do not become so rigidly dependent on the plan that you miss opportunities as trends change. That was the problem with formal business plans. The bigger the company, the more bureaucratic, the more locked a company was with those plans if only from the effort needed to change the plans.

For the average small business owner, a flexible plan is a wise thing to have. Knowing when to make changes and when to adhere to the plan comes with time and experience. However, if you feel the need to “copy” what the competition is doing, one-up them. Do not just copy, make whatever they are doing better, giving the user a reason to stop using the competition and use your company or read your blog instead. Successful businesses need flexible business plans. Of course, many bloggers that want to monetize their blog do not treat their blogs as a business.

That’s another topic for another day.

Written by: Tyme White | Follow Tyme on Twitter | Be Friends on Facebook

• Company allows developers to create software to interact with their product.
• Things go well for a period of time.
• Some greedy developer decides to push the limits, crippling the user experience.
• Company ends up putting in restrictions to block malicious behavior.
• Developers get upset because the rules changed.

People scoff at knowing history but one who takes the time and knows the history of their community or niche will go far by not repeating the same mistakes. Knowing what I stated above, one would think the people who created add-ons for World of Warcraft would not be surprised at the new policy changes. Let’s take a look at what happened and then look into the future.

Things Go Well For a Period of Time

Blizzard, through their API, allows developers to create add-ons that can add functionality to the game or even change the UI’s appearance. World of Warcraft was released four years ago and the add-on community is extremely active. Most add-ons are free, some ask for donations and there are a small amount of premium add-ons that have to be purchased to use. The creativity of the add-on community is excellent. The period of time things went well? Four years. Before we go any further, let’s keep in mind World of Warcraft’s Terms of Service that everyone agrees to when they play the game:

Grant of a Limited License to Use the Service
Subject to your agreement to and continuing compliance with the Terms of Use agreement, you may use the Service solely for your own non-commercial entertainment purposes by accessing it with an authorized, unmodified Game Client. You may not use the Service for any other purpose, or in connection with any other software.

Additional License Limitations.
B. exploit the Game or any of its parts, including without limitation the Service, for any commercial purpose, including without limitation (a) use at a cyber cafe, computer gaming center or any other location-based site without the express written consent of Blizzard; (b) for gathering in-game currency, items or resources for sale outside the Game; or (c) performing in-game services in exchange for payment outside the Game, e.g., power-leveling;

Some greedy developer decides to push the limits, crippling the user experience.

Over time developers got the bright idea of making income off of the add-ons. Most just wanted to recoup their hosting fees and if there was extra they were happy. The ones that wanted to make a living off of their add-on (they went from creating to boost the community to being all about the money). As with all things, if someone is doing something for the wrong reasons they tend to make dumb decisions. Let me be clear in distinguishing the greedy developer from a developer like Zygor. Zygor’s leveling add-on(s) were not free but they handled their “business” like a business by advertising their product, not soliciting customers or abusing privileges, they supported their product, etc. They even had an affiliate program giving bloggers the opportunity to make money. Zygor reminds me of strategy guide publishers. They handled their business the same way.

Enter the Carbonite and QuestHelper developers. Carbonite and QuestHelper are leveling add-ons. Carbonite charged for their add-ons (but had a free limited version) and QuestHelper solicited for donations once the add-on was installed in-game. To compete with QuestHelper Carbonite developers got the bright idea of offering a free version with advertisements, in game. Many users were shocked to update the add-on and find in-game ads. Considering one pays to play World of Warcraft there are not many people who want to see advertisements but there were many people who were dependent on the add-on to level, particularly since the free “crippled” version of Carbonite was included in many UI packages. Things were quickly getting out of hand and it was time for Blizzard to step in. To be fair there are other add-on developers “pushing the limits” but these two add-ons are two the community will always name first.

Company ends up putting in restrictions to block malicious behavior.

The timing was perfect for Blizzard to step in because a patch is on the horizon where many of these add-ons would break. Update under the new terms or leave the playground. Blizzard announced the new add-on policy. Keep in mind that Blizzard does not take away the ability to make money completely:

5) Add-ons may not solicit donations.
Add-ons may not include requests for donations. We recognize the immense amount of effort and resources that go into developing an add-on; however, such requests should be limited to the add-on website or distribution site and should not appear in the game.

Essentially, an add-on developer will possibly make enough to recoup hosting fees and perhaps have extra money but the odds of making a living off an add-on are minimal.

Developers get upset because the rules changed.

Of course, some developers (namely the ones pushing the limits) became upset and some pulled their add-ons. Others will not be updated after the next patch. The add-on community is shaken up a bit but when the patch drops, the community will band together and honestly, there are free add-ons people will migrate to.

The key here: in order for Blizzard (or any company) to stop the deviant behavior, the change has to be applied to the entire community.

History Tends to Repeat Itself

For those that scoff at knowing history, smart people learn from history and do not repeat the same mistakes. If I were a developer I would not expect to earn money from something I built off of someone else’s API unless it was something like Apple or Facebook, where there was a verified (endorsed) system in place. Apple and Facebook charge a fee and encourage the developers to make money. In other words, a better foundation exists to build one’s future. Even in these environments, companies have later added restrictions because of #2 – the greedy developer.

Keep in mind it took four years for Blizzard to implement this change. If you are going to develop something that interacts with someone else’s intellectual property, invest your time with a company that has firm rules in place. It will save you a lot of trouble in the end.

If you opt not to follow my advice and when the inevitable change happens because the greedy developer surfaces, do not complain. Do not whine. You made your bed.

Lie in it. Quietly.

The GFW Radio Podcast had a very frank discussion (MP3) about the conflicts of interest that happen in the gaming community. So did The HotSpot (MP3). Don’t get a warm and fuzzy feeling though. As much as I like these guys they know:

1) The people want to hear this.
2) Because they already know it.
3) And it will blow over in time.

It’s a tough situation if you think about it. Game developers and publishers are in business to make money. To have an authoritative site that focuses on gaming content cooperation from the gaming companies is mandatory. Are the gaming companies going to help a site spread negative press about their games? And pay them to do it by purchasing advertising?

I trust that these guys want to do a good job. I don’t trust cNet at all because their actions speaks louder than any words they can say. This conflict was bound to come out sooner or later and they have placed themselves deeper in this situation – they created this situation.

Yeah I said it.

Back in the day cNet had a crappy gaming site which couldn’t compete with GameSpot. They ended up purchasing zNet and they absorbed GameSpot. They also own MetaCritics and GameRankings. Let’s not forget GameFaq’s and Sports Gamer. And 1UP. Let’s not forget their print magazines. To be fair I won’t leave out the other biggie IGN owning IGN, GameSpy, the Planet sites, TeamXbox, GameStats, GamerMetrics, 3DGamers, etc. but IGN isn’t the one facing this scandal (but they are guilty of the same thing). And I doubt I listed all the gaming holdings for either company.

See, these companies know that people pay attention to the score over the words in a review, which is why they dominate in the game rankings area. If you read the GameSpot and IGN review for Kayne and Lynch, for example, you would notice the words point to a below average game but their scores are above average. That doesn’t make sense does it? To make things worse, on MetaCritics this is on the review page for the game under What The Critics Said:

All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review.

So much for a neutral stance. Here’s a clue, do that on your own reviews. Wait, they can’t, because the game developers are not only providing them the content they are also providing the revenue. Think about it, to do a review the gaming site could definitely wait until the game came out and purchase it. The previews? The betas? The interviews? They need the help of the gaming company and the gaming company wants that positive press out there. There aren’t enough games coming out to rely solely on reviews – the interim content for all of those web sites and magazines depend on cooperation from the gaming companies.

It is not smart to base a company’s content (ie: survival) on the people cutting the checks. If you think gaming companies are going to roll over and play nice when essentially they are in complete control I have a bridge I can sell you.

As well constructed as the plot is, one would assume the game would play smoothly. Unfortunately, it does not. Instead, it plays like a game that lacks focus and needs a few more months of polish. But then, most of the gameplay feels like it was pulled directly out of a game from the last generation, so perhaps more time wouldn’t have done any good.

Does that sound like a 7 to you? The reviewer can state they were honest with their review – that’s their out, honesty in their words. Obviously, IGN opted not to bite the hand that feeds them.

Unfortunately, things aren’t always the way they seem. One has to open their eyes and see people, companies, and situations as they really are.

Honestly, everyone starts of with zero readers so we have all been there. The point remains that sometimes showing those stats can cripple you instead of help you. This isn’t a discussion about whether the tools should be in place to measure traffic. This is about making those statistics public.

Think about this for a minute. There are some sites that start, hit the ground running and accumulate large readerships quickly. This is not the norm. Most take a considerable time investment to grow. It’s a gradual process. When I come across a site that has a FeedBurner badge that shows 10 readers, I see Adsense on the site and there are Digg/Reddit buttons showing most of the articles have no submissions and add to it there is minimal comment activity, what impression do you think you’re making on the reader? Do you realize what you are saying…without actually saying it?

1. You have a very small following.
2. If you’ve been writing for a while and still have no traffic, you suck.
3. You can’t be making much money with advertising if no one is around to view ads.
4. If I advertise on the internet, I’m not going to advertise with you because you don’t have the audience.
5. If you want your blog to be commercial what business logic did you use to justify making those stats public? (Exception – a blog being used as an example on how to build a blog from scratch. Those stats are a measurement tool. Most do not fit in that category.)
6. You’re a follower not a leader. You followed everyone else using the new tools even when the odds are they cripple you more than help you.

Let’s really think about this. If you don’t have much comment activity (makes sense, few readers), do you think the average person is going to take time out of their busy day to write a comment that no one is going to read? Some will, most won’t. You are discouraging people to comment. You are discouraging people to read your site because there are other more qualified sites…you know, the ones that have people reading them. If you really want to be a top player in your niche, it’s time to start thinking better, making wiser decisions, tapping into some leadership qualities – the main one: realizing what you do today can screw you up tomorrow so you best think about what you do today and how it will impact you tomorrow.

If, five months later, your blog proudly shows you gained 10 more readers what does that mean? At that rate by 2025 you’ll be actively competing with the other blogs in your niche, which is the goal right? You’re writing is great, that’s all it takes to have a successful blog, right?

You didn’t really believe that did you?

My point? Using the new cool “thing” isn’t always in your best interest or even better…if you’re going to use the new cool “thing”, use it to your advantage.

There is a problem: what do you do if you want to monetize your site and advertising companies you use rely on third party statistics that are not accurate? Alexa is known for being inaccurate (more to forecast trends than actual stats). What does a blogger/writer do if Alexa is showing inaccurate stats and the advertising company you use relies on Alexa and other third party services? Good question.

Since I use Text Link Ads on this site I decided to ask Patrick Gavin, President of Text Link Ads, how the company deals with issues like this. Seriously, I manage my site and the more information I have the better I can do it.

Tyme: Alexa obviously has accuracy issues – all of them do. Anything with a toolbar can be gamed. Technorati has their issues too. For example, if a site has a high number of inbound links because the blogger requested people to write a review of their site, which many feel is another way of “gaming” the system. Does TLA and Review me have other methods in place to ensure that sites are judged fairly? If so, can you share a little bit about how sites are judged/priced?

Patrick: We agree Alexa is not a perfect solution for gauging a website’s traffic. A perfect example is a blog devoted to Apple users whose user base will be heavy FireFox users not using the Alexa toolbar. Because of this the Alexa ranking for this blog will be disproportionately high compared to say a blog about Microsoft. We understand this so Alexa ranking is not the only criteria we use when pricing our publisher’s websites for our products.

We use a combination of: The website’s theme, location of the ads, number of ads to be sold, Alexa ranking, Technorati rank, and a measure of the website’s link popularity. We have an algorithm that prices our inventory based on these many criteria. The results are never perfect but by taking in six data points it can help even out some of the disparities that happen with Alexa data alone.

Six different data points – that makes me feel better but I can see where more metrics will have to be used to better screen sites initially because those things can be gamed. Getting your site accepted might be a challenge but honestly, it should be. If you’ve already been accepted, how do you make sure your site is getting the best advertising deals?

Text-Link Ads [linkbuildingblog.com no longer active] has a blog with a wealth of information on how to optimize your site and increase traffic. Subscribe to the feed. After going through the blog, do the one thing most people don’t do. Take some responsibility in the monetization of your site and work with the advertising company to get the most out of it. That’s the main point of this entry. Most people slap code on the sidebar and then complain on how it doesn’t perform. Or worse, move the ads around for a month and because there isn’t instant change become frustrated. I see my relationship with TLA like a partnership and I expect them to do their part and I have a responsibility as well. I actually have to manage my site and work with them for optimal success. If you are using a company that you can’t interact with, well…why would you do that?

I had a question, I asked, I received an answer. When I start optimizing this site I will (after looking over the blog) most likely have some more. I know one thing, I’m not going to throw code up blindly and pray it works.

Rick and I will be doing a podcast answering any remaining questions. Keep ‘em coming!

Why isn’t the blog used more to educate people? It seems like it’s mainly used for announcements.

It’s true that we use our blog mainly for announcements that are applicable across FeedBurner’s wide audience. But your point is well taken and there is a lot more we are doing on that front, and will continue to do. Check out recent posts from Dick, me, last fall’s look inside TechCrunch’s numbers, Brent’s bylined articles in Adotas, the hundreds of interviews we’ve done over the past few years with media publications as well as independent publishers, our Publishers Tips site, or last spring’s podcast market overview as a few examples of educational posts. In addition to our own blog, the publisher team (that’s my team) typically leaves 30-50 comments per week on _other_ blogs so that we’re answering questions people ask in near real time. That way, we don’t force people to come to us to get educated about how we work… if they ask, we’ll answer.

I want to know what happened with the Pageflakes thing. How was it resolved? What measures were put in place to stop it from happening again?

This question is referring to a bug where, in certain cases, they were over-reporting the number of Pageflakes subscribers to a given feed. In that case, we contacted Pageflakes, they acknowledged the bug, let us know when it was fixed, and we resumed reporting the Pageflakes data. While we obviously have no control over how web-based aggregators collect and/or report their data, our algorithms are often able to detect anomalies in the data we receive that allows us to proactively reach out to those services to verify the information we’re seeing. When we establish that things are out of whack, we disclose the issue (e.g. this example) and wait until things are resolved before resuming inclusion of their data in the overall reports.

Is it possible to export data and if not will it ever be?

Yes, click “export” from the “Analyze” tab. Data’s available in Excel or CSV format.

What are their privacy policies? The company I work for is starting a blog in Feb. The very first thing they would question is who has access to the stats and what precautions can be made to ensure privacy. I read on a blog that by not checking one thing stats could be pulled through the API.

Our privacy policy is here. By default, your data is private, and no one other than the account holder has access to the data. If you choose to make your data public (which you can do only by explicitly setting the Awareness API service to “public” – it is set to private by default), then anyone who follows the documented API guidelines can retrieve shared data (like circulation, hits, etc.). A good example of how this information can be used well is the podcast directory here. To reiterate, this information is *private* by default, and is only public if you choose to make it so.

I thought FeedBurner had a content network? Can’t find it from the front page.

Since different people mean different things by “content network”, I’m not sure how to answer this. We have FeedBurner networks available to publishers who want to aggregate their content – currently in beta, details are here.

As a blogger am I able to opt out of my site’s data being used for advertising purposes? Data collection?

By default, FeedBurner users are *not* in the ad network, so their data is not used for any advertising purposes. Since the primary reason bloggers use FeedBurner is to collect data about their feeds and sites, I’m not sure how to address a desire to opt out of data collection, so perhaps we need to do some follow-up on this.

How secure is the FeedBurner service for bloggers?

If by secure the questioner is asking about data security, see question/answer above about our privacy policy. We lock our doors at night, and all of our laptops have really secure passwords. If the question pertains to something specific or less sarcastic, let me know and I’ll be happy to address. Beyond that, I’m not sure what to say in terms of security, since the goal of this aspect of the service is to provide publicly available data in the form of RSS feeds.

For commercial use if we decide we do not want to use the service any longer what happens with the data collected from our visitors?

You may export your statistics (via the export feature described above) and delete your account. We do not keep any data once an account is removed from the service. Let me take a minute to address another aspect of leaving FeedBurner that wasn’t asked here but is often asked: specifically, what happens to your subscribers once you choose to leave FeedBurner. They’re your subscribers, we don’t want them after you leave. So we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that your subscribers will follow you after you decide to leave (visit the link for more details).

Will performance be an issue if my site receives a large spike in traffic like Digg?

One of the many reasons publishers choose to use FeedBurner is to offload all bandwidth relating to their feed traffic to us. We manage more than 500,000 feeds, including thousands of feeds for 7 of the 10 top newspapers in the country, 3/4 of the Technorati 100 most popular blogs, and many thousands of high-traffic feeds. With more than a quarter billion feed requests per day, we maintain a high availability server infrastructure, and MySQL has used us as a case study (see this to show how MySQL can be used to power high demand environments like ours). We consistently keep our server farms at fractions of their total capacity, and our connectivity is structured in a way that were we ever to need to spike well above the hundreds of megabits of sustained connectivity we currently use, we could do so without any impact on overall performance.

Which is a long way of saying, “No.”

Why does the FeedBurner count increase dramatically after I am Dugg, then goes down a couple of days later? Did I lose all those visitors?

This is primarily an artefact of prior versions of Firefox (1.5.x and prior), where requests to the feed are labeled the same whether coming from the browser or the feedreader (LiveBookmarks). As a result, we would have to infer from the traffic patterns (i.e., polling intervals, IP addresses, identical user agents) to determine whether the access to the feed was a one-off (i.e., browser) or a repetitive request (i.e., the feed reader). Because of the high concentration of traffic that a site receives when Dugg, those inferences are often impossible to get 100% correct – so some one-off accesses end up looking like repeated requests, and our algorithms count them as subscribers instead of browser views. Recently, the Mozilla team added a unique user agent for the feed reader in Firefox 2.0 (per FeedBurner’s request), which means that these anomalies should be far fewer from now on.

What do they think needs improvement? Can they talk about future plans? They also seem like they are all over the place. What do they DO? Is it feeds, advertising, what is it?

Wow. Let’s see: what needs improvement? Everything. We want the web audience at large to be more comfortable with the notion of subscribing to media feeds. We want publishers to get more value from their feed content by adding more functionality. We want to see creative developers build more cool stuff using our open APIs. We want to sell more ads, so our publishers can make more money. The radiators in our office are maddeningly spotty, so we never know when to dress warm, so that’d be good to fix while we’re improving things.

As far as futures, we’d like to see the Bears win the Super Bowl. A Cubs/Sox World Series would be totally cool, too. On a more serious note, we’ve recently stated that further integration between our feed and site stats is in the near future, as well as a platform for measuring all aspects of content consumption: in a feed, on a site, in a widget, or via some new thing that doesn’t have a buzzword attached to it. However content is consumed, we’ll measure (and monetize) it. Expect to see a lot from us on this in 2007.

Regarding the ‘all over the place’ comment, our goal is simply this: FeedBurner aims to be the world’s foremost provider of online media distribution and audience engagement services. We want to help content publishers, be they independent bloggers or podcasters, blog networks, or commercial publishers – to distribute their media further, engage and build their audience and ultimately, make money. We think we’re in the best position to understand, measure and enhance the distribution of content – via feeds, resyndication, widgets, and who knows what comes next – and then, for publishers who want to capitalize on that understanding, we offer a monetization platform with our advertising network.

Rick and I will be doing a podcast answering any remaining questions. Keep ‘em coming!

Why isn’t the blog used more to educate people? It seems like it’s mainly used for announcements.

It’s true that we use our blog mainly for announcements that are applicable across FeedBurner’s wide audience. But your point is well taken and there is a lot more we are doing on that front, and will continue to do. Check out recent posts from Dick, me, last fall’s look inside TechCrunch’s numbers, Brent’s bylined articles in Adotas, the hundreds of interviews we’ve done over the past few years with media publications as well as independent publishers, our Publishers Tips site, or last spring’s podcast market overview as a few examples of educational posts. In addition to our own blog, the publisher team (that’s my team) typically leaves 30-50 comments per week on _other_ blogs so that we’re answering questions people ask in near real time. That way, we don’t force people to come to us to get educated about how we work… if they ask, we’ll answer.

I want to know what happened with the Pageflakes thing. How was it resolved? What measures were put in place to stop it from happening again?

This question is referring to a bug where, in certain cases, they were over-reporting the number of Pageflakes subscribers to a given feed. In that case, we contacted Pageflakes, they acknowledged the bug, let us know when it was fixed, and we resumed reporting the Pageflakes data. While we obviously have no control over how web-based aggregators collect and/or report their data, our algorithms are often able to detect anomalies in the data we receive that allows us to proactively reach out to those services to verify the information we’re seeing. When we establish that things are out of whack, we disclose the issue (e.g. this example) and wait until things are resolved before resuming inclusion of their data in the overall reports.

Is it possible to export data and if not will it ever be?

Yes, click “export” from the “Analyze” tab. Data’s available in Excel or CSV format.

What are their privacy policies? The company I work for is starting a blog in Feb. The very first thing they would question is who has access to the stats and what precautions can be made to ensure privacy. I read on a blog that by not checking one thing stats could be pulled through the API.

Our privacy policy is here. By default, your data is private, and no one other than the account holder has access to the data. If you choose to make your data public (which you can do only by explicitly setting the Awareness API service to “public” – it is set to private by default), then anyone who follows the documented API guidelines can retrieve shared data (like circulation, hits, etc.). A good example of how this information can be used well is the podcast directory here. To reiterate, this information is *private* by default, and is only public if you choose to make it so.

I thought FeedBurner had a content network? Can’t find it from the front page.

Since different people mean different things by “content network”, I’m not sure how to answer this. We have FeedBurner networks available to publishers who want to aggregate their content – currently in beta, details are here.

As a blogger am I able to opt out of my site’s data being used for advertising purposes? Data collection?

By default, FeedBurner users are *not* in the ad network, so their data is not used for any advertising purposes. Since the primary reason bloggers use FeedBurner is to collect data about their feeds and sites, I’m not sure how to address a desire to opt out of data collection, so perhaps we need to do some follow-up on this.

How secure is the FeedBurner service for bloggers?

If by secure the questioner is asking about data security, see question/answer above about our privacy policy. We lock our doors at night, and all of our laptops have really secure passwords. If the question pertains to something specific or less sarcastic, let me know and I’ll be happy to address. Beyond that, I’m not sure what to say in terms of security, since the goal of this aspect of the service is to provide publicly available data in the form of RSS feeds.

For commercial use if we decide we do not want to use the service any longer what happens with the data collected from our visitors?

You may export your statistics (via the export feature described above) and delete your account. We do not keep any data once an account is removed from the service. Let me take a minute to address another aspect of leaving FeedBurner that wasn’t asked here but is often asked: specifically, what happens to your subscribers once you choose to leave FeedBurner. They’re your subscribers, we don’t want them after you leave. So we’ve gone to great lengths to ensure that your subscribers will follow you after you decide to leave (visit the link for more details).

Will performance be an issue if my site receives a large spike in traffic like Digg?

One of the many reasons publishers choose to use FeedBurner is to offload all bandwidth relating to their feed traffic to us. We manage more than 500,000 feeds, including thousands of feeds for 7 of the 10 top newspapers in the country, 3/4 of the Technorati 100 most popular blogs, and many thousands of high-traffic feeds. With more than a quarter billion feed requests per day, we maintain a high availability server infrastructure, and MySQL has used us as a case study (see this to show how MySQL can be used to power high demand environments like ours). We consistently keep our server farms at fractions of their total capacity, and our connectivity is structured in a way that were we ever to need to spike well above the hundreds of megabits of sustained connectivity we currently use, we could do so without any impact on overall performance.

Which is a long way of saying, “No.”

Why does the FeedBurner count increase dramatically after I am Dugg, then goes down a couple of days later? Did I lose all those visitors?

This is primarily an artefact of prior versions of Firefox (1.5.x and prior), where requests to the feed are labeled the same whether coming from the browser or the feedreader (LiveBookmarks). As a result, we would have to infer from the traffic patterns (i.e., polling intervals, IP addresses, identical user agents) to determine whether the access to the feed was a one-off (i.e., browser) or a repetitive request (i.e., the feed reader). Because of the high concentration of traffic that a site receives when Dugg, those inferences are often impossible to get 100% correct – so some one-off accesses end up looking like repeated requests, and our algorithms count them as subscribers instead of browser views. Recently, the Mozilla team added a unique user agent for the feed reader in Firefox 2.0 (per FeedBurner’s request), which means that these anomalies should be far fewer from now on.

What do they think needs improvement? Can they talk about future plans? They also seem like they are all over the place. What do they DO? Is it feeds, advertising, what is it?

Wow. Let’s see: what needs improvement? Everything. We want the web audience at large to be more comfortable with the notion of subscribing to media feeds. We want publishers to get more value from their feed content by adding more functionality. We want to see creative developers build more cool stuff using our open APIs. We want to sell more ads, so our publishers can make more money. The radiators in our office are maddeningly spotty, so we never know when to dress warm, so that’d be good to fix while we’re improving things.

As far as futures, we’d like to see the Bears win the Super Bowl. A Cubs/Sox World Series would be totally cool, too. On a more serious note, we’ve recently stated that further integration between our feed and site stats is in the near future, as well as a platform for measuring all aspects of content consumption: in a feed, on a site, in a widget, or via some new thing that doesn’t have a buzzword attached to it. However content is consumed, we’ll measure (and monetize) it. Expect to see a lot from us on this in 2007.

Regarding the ‘all over the place’ comment, our goal is simply this: FeedBurner aims to be the world’s foremost provider of online media distribution and audience engagement services. We want to help content publishers, be they independent bloggers or podcasters, blog networks, or commercial publishers – to distribute their media further, engage and build their audience and ultimately, make money. We think we’re in the best position to understand, measure and enhance the distribution of content – via feeds, resyndication, widgets, and who knows what comes next – and then, for publishers who want to capitalize on that understanding, we offer a monetization platform with our advertising network.

Wait Tyme! You’re jumping the gun! I have a strategy! I have a plan! Tyme says: bunk.

Example, I have three sites. As most know I had more but I condensed them to three. What are my goals for Not Too Geeky? I want Not Too Geeky to be successful. There are trends I’d like to be the catalyst in changing. I want to share my knowledge of new technologies as I learn them. I want to monetize the blog. I want to improve my writing skills. Five goals, not an overwhelming list right? Well, what is considered successful? What things do I want to change? What new technologies? How much money do I want to make? What about my writing skills needs improvement?

Specifically, success is 10,000 unique visitors a day. New technology will be online applications, Web (insert whatever number here). I want to make 30K a year. I want to polish my professionalism in my writing skills without being boring.

Now we’re getting some place right? Well, can I make 30K a year on 10,000 unique visitors a day? What do I have to do to receive 10K unique visitors per day? If my site becomes professional, and I know my niche audience is not, will that turn them off?

I’m starting to bump into problems. To draw traffic I would most likely have to write more than one article a day. And they would need to be quality articles, increasing my writing/research time. To make $30K I would most likely need to sell advertising rather than third party ads otherwise I would have to put a lot of ads on the page, and that would irritate my readers. If I’m selling ads myself that means more time needs to be set aside dedicated to that. If my readers like my writing style, why would I change it? Who am I writing for, me or someone else’s expectations?

Got it! If I write three articles a day I should be able to do that in three hours max. This includes finding the articles, research to make sure the information is accurate, sending emails to confirm information if necessary and writing them. Instead of making them more professional how about more grammatically correct. Then go to lunch. Come back and work on sales for one hour per day. I need to set aside time for making contacts in the industry, so another hour per day. In between I can moderate/respond to comments and answer email. Tops 7 hours. Done. Perfect.

Except I have two other sites, what about those?

I can trim down the article writing time from three articles to 2 and cut the research down by 1 hour leaving two hours. Cool, I’m down to 6 hours. Ok, I don’t have to make 30K a year, 20K is cool. Great, I can use third party ads.

This is an example of why there are so many average to crappy blogs out there. People stretch themselves too thin with their expectations, then settle for less than their original intent. Of course this entire process was thrown off because the wrong question was asked in the first place.

What’s the right question? I have three sites, what do I need to do for all of them to be successful? Welcome to Systems Thinking.

Deceive: To accept as true or valid what is false or invalid

Hard to believe that bloggers do this all the time. Not intentionally; bloggers many times do not put themselves in the shoes of their readers. A loyal readership requires trust and trust can only be built minus deceit. Let me blunt: bloggers think they do not have to disclose certain things and I suppose to an extent they don’t expect anyone to trust you. If there is nothing to hide.

Feedburner is a service that provides various tools for blogger, like advertising possibilities and user statistics. Recently Feedburner announced that they will be offering advertising for web sites and blogs. The concept behind Feedburner is a good one but in my opinion, bloggers are putting themselves in a possibly bad position. For example, some bloggers are very stat happy people. They want to know how many readers they have, where they are located, what they are reading, etc. Stats, when considered accurately and gathered openly, are good to have. The problem is that many bloggers decide to use a third party to gather that information, like stat counters or Feedburner. That’s fine, but the third-party has to be collecting data if only to provide the blogger with the stats. Shouldn’t the blogger disclose to the reader that there is a third party tracking a reader’s movements? Especially since there isn’t a way to opt out?

Remember when Real Networks put a phone-home type feature in their Real Player so that user statistics could be gathered? That really upset people because it was on by default, originally the ability to opt out wasn’t there and most important, people didn’t like being tracked. The average user doesn’t like tracker cookies, which is why companies like Ad-Aware are in business.

If bloggers know people don’t like to be tracked without being told, why do they do it?

NOOOO! The blogger says. We are collecting the data to better serve the readers! Funny, Real thought the same thing.

WAIT! Real could uniquely identify a listener! In a short period of time, everyone will have a static IP and identification will be very simple even for the novice blogger.

How do you think a novice reader feels when they visit a site, get a tracking cookie, don’t realize they have it, run Ad-Aware, the tracking cookie comes up as critical and they wonder where they got it? The reader, now cautious, begins retracing their steps but more cautious now…if they didn’t use their browser to block the cookie. If the user blocks the tracking, the stats aren’t accurate. Either way, unless the reader understands what is going on (and most don’t), the reader comes away with the feeling of being deceived.

But those stats are so important right?

I’m really excited about the “TechCrunch Sponsors” area of the site in the top right. This is an area where people can purchase a permanent presence on TechCrunch and gain access to our audience. We’re going to be very selective about the brands we allow there – we’re not just putting their logos up, we’re saying that we believe in the product as well.

I bet you are Mike. Let’s check out why you’re so excited, since you’re pimping it:

Pricing for each of the four ad units is currently $7,500 per month, which translated to a very low CPM. There is a minimum term of two months, followed by a month-to-month plan where either party may terminate the relationship on 30 days notice.

4×7500=30,000×12=$360,000 a year

Let’s quote Mike:

Revenue generation from advertising isn’t and won’t be the primary goal of this site because the value of TechCrunch isn’t in page views, but in networking (I agree with Dave Winer almost entirely on this).

Yeah, right. What a difference six months makes. To find that entry I had to dig around a bit, and I noticed another pageview inflating change. The archives (if you can find them) only has 5 entries per page. To find the entry I was looking for I impatiently had to click several pages back. In total I probably created 20 impression just trying to find what I knew was there. Makes me take a much closer look at those impression figures.

Quoting Mike…again:

And if you’re wondering about the green theme, there’s a reason for it (hint – it keeps me focused on my goals).

Yes, I get it…laughing all the way to the bank. Thanks for bashing your readers over the head with the concept. Much appreciated…and I appreciate it so much…I unsubscribed. That much focus on money + that much money + change in policy = bias (to me).