2 Years Older, and 208,474 Feeds Wiser
Happy Birthday to us! Though the company was founded back in October of 2003, today is the official two-year anniversary of our pre-alpha launch. (Did you know "grappa" comes before "alpha?" Cheers.) — FeedBurner was born from [jets] …
Context & Ripple Effects
FeedBurner has spent its first two years building an intermediary role around RSS: managing feeds, measuring their audiences and placing advertising for publishers. Its FeedFlare launch in late 2005 also extended that role from delivery and measurement into services attached to syndicated content.
The reported 208,474 feeds puts the anniversary in the context of a rapidly expanding publisher base. Feedster's new site and feature rollout shows that feed discovery and aggregation were also becoming active competitive layers around the same publishing format.
First-order effects
- FeedBurner gains a larger base of publisher feeds from which to standardize distribution, audience measurement and ad placement.
- Publishers using FeedBurner can attach services through FeedFlare as their content travels across feeds, making the feed more than a simple delivery channel.
Second-order effects
- Feedster and other feed-discovery services must compete for relevance as FeedBurner becomes a more embedded part of publishers' distribution and measurement workflow.
- Advertisers seeking RSS audiences gain a more centralized route to inventory, while publishers become more dependent on FeedBurner's reporting and monetization layer.
Third-order effects
- If feed growth continues, RSS publishing is likely to organize around infrastructure providers that control measurement, monetization and extensions rather than around standalone readers alone.
The trend: RSS is evolving from a decentralized publishing format into a commercial infrastructure market built around audience measurement, service layers and advertising access.