FeedBurner has announced the availability of Total Stats Pro, their for-fee (i.e., Premium) Feed measurement/reporting service; remaining consistent with the company’s positioning, they’ve simultaneously announced welcome additions to their free reporting offering.
Where does that put things? FeedBurner sums it up nicely:
Existing:
* Feed circulation reports, still free!
New:
* Ad summary performance, free
* Circulation trend chart, free
* Detailed feed item statistics, Total Stats Pro
* Referrer report and where is my feed republished, Total Stats Pro
* Detailed ad metrics, Total Stats Pro
Pricing is based on the number of Feeds managed via Total Stats Pro.
There are a lot of reasons to want enhanced Feed reporting… the most important one might just be for people who plan to run Ads in Feeds… yup, independent ad impression/click data, to keep Google, Yahoo, et al honest. $5/month isn’t much to pay if you’ve got real revenue flowing through your Feeds.
(On the other hand, I can think of some very cool widgets extending off the ‘exhaust’ meta-data that would broaden the appeal of this offering… I really need to find a decent PHP dev to conspire with.)
Update:
Niall Kennedy smartly points out some of the potential technical holes in FeedBurner’s implementation (which warrant a response from the company). These are pretty well known issues, so my fingers are crossed that FB has been clever in addressing some of them; Niall’s right, however, in that ultimately many of these issues will require cooperation from aggregator devs.
Niall also states that, “If hosted services such as TypePad or Blogware are not already thinking about how to integrate more statistics into their own interface the idea that some of their users are now paying an extra $5 a month for an outside service may be enough motivation to get the job done.”
Perhaps; I’ve pointed this out in the past as well. The issue isn’t about getting the job done, though… it’s about where best to spend scarce dev resources. Forward integration is always possible (granted, timing is important)… but with Yahoo & MSN moving quickly (and Google finally showing signs of life with the intro of Google Mobile), the build vs. partner question around Feed Mgmt is very valid in my mind. It’ll be interesting to see how TypePad decides to leverage its desirable position in the value chain.