Feedpass.com Goes Unsold on eBay
Feedpass, a Utah-based company, went unsold on ebay.
Feedpass, like Feedburner, will take any rss feed or url and make it more manageable. The way they differentiate themselves is that the user-burner of the feed can add their google adsense code to the landing page, in an effort to monetize the feed. The burner of the feed gets a cut of the cpc proceeds, and feedpass gets the rest. I’ve been careful to say “the burner of the feed” because this is the controversial portion: people can burn rss feeds or url’s of web properties and content that are not theirs. This means that I could burn someone else’s feed, stick my adsense code on that landing page, and profit off of it.
Aside from that shady maneuvering, there isn’t much else to Feedpass. Apparently, I’m not alone in thinking this. The Feedpass eBay auction ended on August 7, 2006 and it went unsold, with the highest bid at $4,050.00. There was a reserve price, which went unmet. According to Feedpass, they are selling because . . .
Why Is Feedpass For Sale?
The bottom line is we’re curious to see what the market value might be for such a valuable domain and the code that runs it. We believe that the current value just for the Feedpass.com domain name alone is at least $1 million dollars. Given some focus, the company could quickly generate millions more in additional funding from the VC community. FeedBurner has been funded by VCs to the tune of at least $10 million dollars to date. One of those VCs is Union Square Ventures (USV). Read this article from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures on why they invested in FeedBurner and you’ll start to see why we’re so excited about Feedpass. A couple of key points: 1) RSS will become mainstream and 2) RSS will be monetized. Fred is right on the money, and I suspect that the USV investment in FeedBurner will reward his firm handsomely in time.
Well, their curiousity was met to the tune of $4K. Not much. I’m not an IP attorney, so I don’t know what the rules are exactly on the Fair Use Clause. But, claiming someone else’s content and monetizing it just feels shady to me.
The coolest part about this whole controversy is that Feedpass is a Utah-based company; since I’m now a Utah resident, I’m interested in the success of Utah-based technology companies. I’d like to get more involved in more Utah, technology shindigs.
As for Feedpass, we’ll see if they pick up and go after Feedburner like they said they would:
Competing With FeedBurner
Feedpass is one of the only sites mentioned frequently as a competitor to FeedBurner. The fact of the matter is that we currently compete with FeedBurner only as an RSS feed landing page. The advantage that many users have pointed out is that we don’t require anyone to “burn” their feed. Instead, Feedpass creates a simple feed URL, but the original feed is untouched. Feedpass has yet to venture into direct competition with FeedBurner in the area of statistics, but we believe that such a service could and should become an integral part of Feedpass in the future.Some have said, “You can’t compete with FeedBurner.” To that we say, “Bring it on!” In fact, FeedBurner’s share of the current market is limited. Sure, for users that are looking for landing pages and feed statistics, FeedBurner leads the market. But, considering that FeedBurner only manages feeds for 218,400 publishers, we believe there is massive unclaimed share available. We base this on the estimate that nearly 100,000 new blogs are started every single day. Services like Technorati.com currently track roughly 50 million blogs. A recent PEW study, mentioned on the KBCafe RSS Blog, called “A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers” says that only 18% of bloggers offer an RSS feed. That’s a massive number of bloggers who likely aren’t making subscribing to their blog an easy task. Feedburner caters to the “tech-savvy” for the most part. We believe that the real winner in this market will be the company that figures out how to tap into the millions of “average” bloggers using popular off-the-shelf tools like Blogger, LiveJournal, MySpace, etc.
Best of luck to Feedpass and, if not soon, they’ve got to seriously address the Fair Use issue, because that is a seriously huge point of resistance by many, many people. Best of luck.
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An updated 10 commandments would include “Thou shalf not monetize other people’s content?”