Sunday, May 21, 2006

Feedpass debuted last week — another landing page service for your blog, but with an added twist in the form of advertising.  Feedpass excerpts your feed, wraps it inside a pretty page with a bunch of tagging features, and puts a strip of Google advertising on the right hand side. You can see what my feed looks like here. They then split the ad revenue with you, 2/3 if you are the owner of the feed, or 1/3 if you are not, but are providing that feed to your readers somehow.  Here’s how it works:

1. If you create a FeedPass feed for a blog, publish that FeedPass feed, and others click on the advertising wrapped into that feed, then you, as the creator of the FeedPass feed are entitled to credit for 1 of every 3 clicks on advertising in the feed.
2. If you are the owner of the feed created in step 1, and then claim that feed, you are entitled to credit for 2 of every 3 clicks on advertising in that feed.
3. If you are the owner of the feed created in step 1, and someone else creates an identical feed, or points at your feed, then you are entitled to an additional to credit for 1 of every 3 clicks generated in this fashion. 

And that is where the line potentially gets crossed.   You see, with FeedPass, anyone can create a feed for any blog anywhere, which FeedPass will monetize and pay 1/3 of the revenue to the creator of the feed. The owner of the blog that provides the content for the feed is not part of the picture, at all, unless they have claimed that blog. Because FeedPass only publishes excerpts, they are covered by fair use, so it’s not a copyright violation for them to do this, nor does it violate the Create Commons license I’ve attached to my feed.  But:

1. What is to stop a FeedPass click-fraud network from being set up?  It would not be as lucrative as direct click-fraud, but with one or two levels of indirection it would likely be much harder to track down. 
2. What would stop someone from creating multiple feeds for some of the very popular content on the internet, thus siphoning off revenues which legitimately belong to the owner of the content?  The benefit of FeedPass to small site owners is increased exposure.  But what if you’re Mike Arrington, or Dave Winer?

For now, I’ve claimed my blog.  It seems a prudent thing to do.  If FeedPass takes off, then I want my share of any advertising revenue they generate.  I’m not sure I’ll do more until then, though. 

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