Interactive Q&A: Dick Costolo, Co-Founder and CEO of FeedBurner

This is the latest in the Seeking Alpha series of interviews with leading companies of interest to our readers. These, however, are interviews with a twist: the executive has agreed to answer questions and respond to comments not from a single interviewer, but rather from our community of readers and contributors.

This interactive Q&A is with Dick Costolo, Co-Founder and CEO of FeedBurner, the privately-held news feed and readership management provider. FeedBurner has sponsored this interview, which works like this:

• Dick briefly introduces himself and the issues he's focused on below.
• Readers and contributors can immediately start to post questions and remarks using the comment box below (Note: you need to sign up for free registration and be logged in to do so).
• Seeking Alpha editors will not filter or edit the questions and comments from readers, except to delete profane or hostile language.
• Dick will respond to the questions and remarks beginning Wednesday, April 25th. Readers can track his answers and respond to them during that period, with the resulting dialogue remaining on the site.

Yahoo Finance readers may join the Q&A by following this link.

Over to Dick:

Hi - I'm Dick Costolo, author of "Rice Pudding: Fact or Fiction" and more recently cofounder/CEO of FeedBurner, the leading platform for media distribution and audience engagement services. We provide online publishers and marketers with services to help them distribute content feeds and measure their influence on the Web while engaging and building an audience. Our customers run the gamut - from Reuters and Dow Jones to top blogs, podcasts and other gamut-running properties.

I'm looking forward to answering any questions you might have about media fragmentation and distribution, advertising strategies for new media, RSS and blogs. I also author a blog called Ask the Wizard, where I provide a rambling yet enthusiastic third-person account of entrepreneurship and building a company from the ground up.

I'm happy to discuss a range of topics with Seeking Alpha readers, including:

• Growth trends for distributed content and its disruption on traditional media channels and strategies
• Monetization strategies that work (and don't work) for various types of online content producers
• The future of media on the Intertubes
• Start-up lessons learned

Comments

[Dominic Jones_:]

Hi Dick,

First, thanks for a great service and congrats on building a remarkable service-oriented company culture. I'm sure I speak for many FeedBurner users when I say we are truly spoiled.

My question: With a growing number of companies starting to offer RSS feeds for their investor news and disclosures, which company, if any, is aggregating all of these feeds into one big pipe and smaller ones based on industries etc. It's a pain to have to subscribe to each company's feed separately and while there are tools to mix your own feeds, that can be time consuming. Is this something FeedBurner might consider doing?

2007 Apr 24 05:50 PM

[Dick Costolo:]

Dominic, thanks for the kind words. While it's never a good idea to say "that's not something we'll ever do", I don't see us heading down that path. I do think you highlight an opportunity that's currently underserved in the market, and that's the ability to provide infrastructure services around feeds that enable third parties or consumers to easily create value-added services from the growing landscape of available feeds. Yahoo pipes is of course a very general approach to this, but there are probably more application-centric or vertically focused tools that one could imagine. You could certainly suppose that companies like InfoNGEN will attack this opportunity for the financial services industry.

2007 Apr 25 05:05 PM

[Dominic Jones_:]

Thanks, Dick.

2007 Apr 25 07:59 PM

[User 1:]

Dick,

Thanks for doing this. Scott Karp just wrote "Without a filter, RSS has no value."

What are your thoughts on that, and what is Feedburner developing to address the issue?

Thanks,
Dave

2007 Apr 25 08:20 AM

[Dick Costolo:]

Scott is a very careful thinker and you could probably lose a lot of money ignoring his opinions. Having said that, I don't really understand the context for Scott's comment, and as such, I'm not sure whether I agree or disagree with it! If it's meant to stand on its own, then I'd generally disagree with the sentiment, since feeds are already filters in an of themselves, providing you only with updates from the specific filters (content providers) in which you've expressed an interest. If, on the other hand, the sentiment is meant to reflect the growing need for the abliity to further refine updates as you subscribe to more and more feeds, I would expect the subscriber facing services like NewsGator and Google Reader to be in this business. The kinds of filters you will see us providing on the publisher side are filters that enable a content provider to generate one master feed but disseminate thousands of parameter specific feeds to subscribers. We already provide this parameterized feed capability (eg, a general feed that provides a weather feed for any specific zip code a subscriber prefers) for a number of commercial publishers. The parameterized feed capability can be expanded in a variety of ways, and if the market trends in that direction, we have a very extensible capability there that we can attack.

2007 Apr 25 05:13 PM

[User 1:]

Thanks for answering questions, Dick.

What do you think of Yahoo Pipes? And which company do you think will best leverage RSS -- Yahoo or Google? And why?

2007 Apr 25 08:22 AM

[Dick Costolo:]

I think Yahoo Pipes is an important first step in a potentially huge market. As I mentioned above, there is a growing need and opportunity for value-added services that can be achieved via the manipulation of existing sets of feeds within industry verticals or 3rd party application integration. Pipes itself is probably too general purpose to seize that particular market, but I think that Yahoo has a real opportunity to leverage the capability internally in order to provide consumers with interesting sets of bundled/filtered content. They could use the tool, for example, to provide a Chicago Sports Roundup feed to chicago sports fans, knowing that 99.9% of us wouldn't be able to piece such a thing together in Pipes ourselves. To your second question, it's not obvious to me that it will be one of those two companies that best leverages RSS, but if you're asking me which of those two will better leverage the capability, that is ground on which I dare not tread.

2007 Apr 25 05:28 PM

[User 1:]

Thank you for participating, Dick.

My question is this: many blogs I used to read have shut down. After the initial fun of publishing, many bloggers seem to find that there's nothing in it for them, in particular no money.

How much do you think blogging is a fad (with no financial incentive to support it) that will pass?

2007 Apr 25 08:23 AM

[Dick Costolo:]

Hi Ed, I don't personally see any evidence that blogging is just a fad, and my strong personal belief is that it is a growing and permanent part of the landscape. Certainly blogs will come and go, rise and fall, but in the aggregate, the barriers to publication have been reduced, and blogs/podcasts/videoca... are giving rise to a bulk of content authors whose costs are so low (not just real costs but opportunity costs) that you can blog for money OR attention without incurring losses. As such, while I do believe there are a host of bloggers who will indeed make significant money, it's also the case that it's not a requirement for the ongoing success of the medium, if we want to call it a medium.

2007 Apr 25 05:37 PM

[User 1:]

Hi Dick, thanks for doing this.

If you had to buy one publicly traded stock based on the industry perspective you have from Feedburner, what would it be and why?

2007 Apr 25 01:13 PM

[Dick Costolo:]

I can say with the straightest face that the insights I have gained from FeedBurner have provided me with absolutely no more enhanced perspective on today's public markets than one might gain from reading the archived front page of the August 18, 1974 Wall St. Journal. I'll say this. I have been surprised by the clarity of focus with which many of today's major media companies understand the implications and alternative futures afforded by distributed media and fragmented audience. I think that by attempting to categorize entities as "old media" or "new media", investors miss a breadth a different approaches that existing media companies are taking in the market. I have already mentioned that I've been impressed by the executive team at Reuters, and I think similarly of the folks at Dow Jones and numerous others. The last point I'll make here is that I'm confident that these reduced barriers to "broadcast and distribution" will facilitate the rise of several as yet unseen media powerhouses that will leverage their brands in other markets to become media giants in a particular vertical.

2007 Apr 25 05:48 PM

[User 1:]

Hi Dick,

The newspaper stocks are doing really badly and many just reported horrible results this quarter. From your perspective, are you seeing any of them making smart moves with their content online or with RSS?

Thanks,
Spencer

2007 Apr 25 01:15 PM

[Dick Costolo:]

Yes. USA Today is aggressively changing the way they think about presenting and distributing content in very compelling ways. Several of the Hearst properties are working with us and others as they continue to evolve the way they think about online presence. The SF Chronicle's Correct Me if I'm Wrong podcast is one of the most innovative things I've seen from any media property, independent/new/old/ot... in the last year. I suppose I should find the link for that - here you go: www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin...;cat=1066

I won't just blow the horn of FB customers. Martin Nisenholtz at the NY Times Digital has made a number of moves and acquisitions that have worked out extremely well, and I remember people laughing at the About.com acquisition when NYT made that move but it has proved to be tremendously successful. I think there was an appreciation for SEO there before others even realized what it was.

2007 Apr 25 06:01 PM

[User 1:]

Thanks for answering questions, Dick.

Which topic or subject areas are the most popular in terms of RSS feeds, and which are growing fastest?

What % of subscriptions to RSS feeds do you think are tech related?

2007 Apr 25 01:18 PM

[Dick Costolo:]

Well, I think you'll be surprised at the answer here. If you think purely about text feeds, many of the technology publications and blogs are the most popular because they were embraced by the early adopters who spread the word. So you could say they got a running jump on the rest of the content and we'll just see how long that lasts. In the podcast world, however, I'd say religion and language are two of the more popular content types, and you can probably attribute that to iPods and iTunes. Because you didn't need to be a tech whiz to download podcasts onto your iPod once iTunes made subscription a real one-step process, we saw a huge jump in the popularity of all sorts of podcast topics, and again, chief among these as a group are religious topics and learning another language. Something we certainly never would have guessed. Overall, we're also seeing a tremendous rise in subscribers to commerce/retail feeds, such as feeds of offers from credit cards, hotels, etc.

2007 Apr 25 06:09 PM

[User 1:]

That ends this interactive Q&A, which will now be closed to further questions. Many thanks to Dick Costolo of Feedburner, and to Seeking Alpha's community of readers and participants for their questions and comments.

2007 Apr 26 06:11 AM