A Feed Subscription Marketing Ecosystem

I’ve often thought that the most natural way to monetize feeds is to showcase other feeds that you can subscribe to. Use feeds to market other feeds.

So I’ve decided to try that concept out. I’ve made up an ad for this blog’s feed.  It looks like this:

And I am now running it in a number of channels in the FeedBurner ad network. Those of you who use FAN to monetize your feed have probably seen this ad come across your desk for approval this morning. I hope you approved it.

Here’s how I am thinking about it. I make about $1000 per month with FeedBurner. So I am going to use half of that money to market my blog’s feed. What I want to see is how much I can increase my feed subs with that money.

Each blog sub is worth about $0.10/month to me (I have about 10,000 subs). Let’s assume that the average subscriber stays with me for 6 months (I honestly don’t know and I need FeedBurner to give me the tools to figure that out). Then the lifetime value of a sub is $0.60. If I spend $500/month, I’ll need to add 830 subs each month to breakeven.

I don’t know that I will breakeven on the deal. But I’ll learn a lot. I know how many impressions I am getting. I’ll know how many subs I get from the deal. And that will tell me what the right cpm to pay going forward.

I’ll keep you all posted on how this experiment goes.