The “new, experimental interface” bears a strong resemblance to Google Analytics, but the really beauty is within the works — the interface offers real-time stats for clicks, views and podcast downloads, allowing publishers to see what’s hot and getting traffic at that very moment. Google notes, however, that subscriber and reach numbers are still based on a day’s worth of requests.

In addition, publishers can get feed-related Twitter and Google reader stats if they use the FeedBurner Socialize service along with PubSubHubbub (by the way, Google, I feel stupid just typing that), or if they “ping” Big G when posting. The old interface is still available for those of you scared of real-time — just like live network television, some of us need that seven-second delay.

Feedburner was the baby of Dick Costolo, who can now be found in the CEO’s chair at Twitter… When he’s not modeling.

FeedBurner is a small company of about 30 employees and although the exact financial details have not been released, Google will pay around $100 million for the platform that allows content creators to monetize their feeds with ads. FeedBurner also offers detailed analytics that measure who is getting the feeds.

“FeedBurner has created an effective set of tools,” said Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice president of product management.

“We think this will be a win for users, publishers and advertisers on the Internet,” she said. “FeedBurner shares our vision for making ad and content distribution very measurable.”

According to Dick Costolo, FeedBurner CEO and co-founder, his company has serviced 431,731 publishers worldwide as of Wednesday of last week. The company is a major distributor of RSS feeds for publishers such as Reuters and USA Today.

By acquiring FeedBurner, Google has secured an avenue that many advertisers are beginning to turn to more often in an attempt to reach niche audiences.

But since online marketing trends and technologies seem to emerge (and vanish) with the patience and speed of a chopping block, ADOTAS figured it was more than enough time to reconnect with an RSS expert and see what’s developed—for better or for worse—in the field of feed management.

Recently, ADOTAS conducted a lengthy interview with Brent Hill, VP of advertising services at FeedBurner, one of the most recognizable names in feed management. Hill, much like his discourse on the state of RSS earlier this year, remains adamant that the content tool is now a powerful marketing outlet. But while the praise and optimism is fully intact, Hill also admits that there is much room for improvement with RSS and feed management overall—from adoption to advertising opportunities. Here, he describes in detail what’s new, what’s different and what’s next for RSS.

It’s been six months since we discussed the state of feed management and RSS. How have things changed since then, for both FeedBurner and the industry as a whole?

There are two trends we’re seeing on the publishing side:

a) What started as a publishing phenomenon is now a marketing phenomenon, as companies in virtually every industry segment are using feeds to communicate with customers or constituents via RSS. Commercial media publishers like USA Today and Reuters, and popular blogs like Engadget and Boing Boing are being joined by the likes of Acura, Zales, and Orbitz.

b) As the RSS audience continues to grow, and companies like FeedBurner provide scaleable entry points for advertisers, we’re seeing more digital media plans containing an RSS advertising component. We’ve moved beyond testing, and we’re seeing repeat customers who are making feeds a part of their ongoing digital planning.

For FeedBurner, we continue to see dramatic growth on two fronts:

c) FeedBurner continues to be the feed management platform of choice for the world’s leading feed publishers — from commercial publishers like Fast Company to popular blogs like Instapundit, and corporate marketers like Marriott. We’re now managing 480,000 feeds for 275,000 publishers, delivering 28 million feed subscriptions each day. The number of daily feed subscriptions has doubled in the last 6 months.

d) More advertisers are using advertising in feeds as part of their digital media planning. In Q4, we will manage marketing campaigns for blue-chip advertisers in a variety of industries…including technology, financial services, communications, entertainment, and consumer products.

Is RSS still a niche concept, or has it experienced significant adaptation in the past six months?

While RSS is still used by less than 50% of the online user base, it’s beyond a niche concept because even if you multiply a modest percentage by the size of the online audience, you’re still talking about millions of subscribers. And in some sectors — information technology, for example — you have a much larger percentage of the online audience using feeds. Virtually ever publisher we work with is experiencing organic growth in their feed subscriber base.

The OSTG, which publishes sites like tech news site Slashdot, Open Source resource site SourceForge, and retail site ThinkGeek, reaches millions of subscribers. While FeedBurner’s aggregation, analysis and feed stat reporting services will help the OSTG manage those subscriptions, the addition of the FeedBurner Ad Network will help monetize them.

“We are delighted to be able to offer advertisers the opportunity to deliver pertinent, selective information to our fast-growing and loyal online community through the FeedBurner Ad Network,” said OSTG group president Rich Marino in a statement. “FeedFoundry [FeedBurner's management service] tells us that over 30 million ad impressions are available each month, and our available impressions have grown 10% in the last two months. This represents a tremendous growth area for us in 2007.”

In addition to FeedFoundry, the OSTG is also using FeedFlare, a service that lets subscribers share feed content and can cross-promote other content on the OSTG network.

“Blogbeat’s approach to leveraging feeds as a means to gather information about the blog is directly aligned with ours,” said FeedBurner co-founder and COO Steve Olechowski in a statement, “This expansion supports our goal to provide online publishers with the most comprehensive picture of feed-related activity on the market today.”

BlogBeat’s services will be added to FeedBurner’s already robust suite of free feed management tools. BlogBeat’s founder will join FeedBurner as its new web analytics lead engineer. Complete integration of BlogBeat should be completed by the end of the year. Until then, BlogBeat won’t be taking on any new customers.

Geffen will in turn be implementing the full suite of FeedBurner’s feed management services to add rich interactivity to its feeds and Web site. According to the release, Geffen will become the first in the music recording industry to integrate feeds so thoroughly into its overall promotional strategy to convert passive Web site visitors into loyal subscribers.

FeedBurner’s full range of services will provide a platform on which Geffen can launch new artists and bring fans closer to their favorite performers via music communities. Using FeedBurner’s FeedFlare service, Geffen will let fans interact directly with performers’ sites by rating albums at iTunes or becoming a friend of the band through MySpace. The record label also plans to reach the millions of feed subscribers available through the FeedBurner Ad Network by placing media to coincide with upcoming album launches and other promotions.

“The target audiences of our artists are plugged in and constantly in search of a direct line of communication to their favorite performers,” said Lee Hammond, Director of New Media at Geffen Records, in a press statement. “When we started laying the groundwork for the new site, our early trials indicated that the feed is one of our most loyal communication vehicles. With FeedBurner’s platform, we are able to strengthen this key channel and offer a wide range of services that benefit fans and performers. We were very impressed with the breadth, depth and simplicity of FeedBurner’s services.”

As part of a re-launch of the Geffen Web site, the company will offer subscription feeds for more than 50 artists spanning a wide range of genres. The company will utilize FeedBurner’s FeedFoundry service designed for mass feed management featuring one-click service activation and detailed usage reports across all properties.

In just two years’ time, RSS has become more layered than a wedding cake. Once advertising models and various technologies were implanted into this field of syndicated, bite-size feeds of news and information, it became increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of who was actually pushing this medium forward.

While RSS feed readers are sprouting like May flowers nowadays, a little more research was needed to see who was actually steering the mothership. In doing so, a name that constantly came up early and often was Feedburner, a market-leading feed management provider founded by four web designers and software developers in 2003.

Now reaching millions of subscribers in 190 countries, Feedburner, according to VP of Business Development Brent Hill (above), is a universal RSS management platform. “We manage feeds on behalf of publishers,” he tells ADOTAS, “everything from blog and blog networks to commercial publishers in the online media sector. It can be an individual blogger like Jeff Jarvis and Buzz Machine or it can be a blog network like Gawker Media. Commercial publisher examples are US Today, Reuters, Fast Company, Ink Magazine and Tech Target. So, it’s very much small-to-big, and everything in between.”

But what exactly propels Feedburner to the upper echelons of RSS—a position from where this privately-held, Chicago-based company currently distributes nearly 11 million subscriptions per day while managing a quarter-million feeds from over 150,000 publishers? “One of the reasons publishers use us — and there are a couple — is for analytics,” Hill explains. “We’ve been writing analytics for publishers for two years around the number of subscribers to their feed, the reach that they have every day, and how users interact with the content, [along with] how many items [visitors] view in the space and how many clicks they have on those items.”

He continues, “I’ll give you an example of a very practical use of Feedburner. A blogger that writes about hotel properties around the world…uses his Feedburner to show basically the ranking of items in their popularity, uses that as a property for what his audiences are interested in, and knows that he needs more stories about New York vs. London vs. Paris.”

Besides the analytics providing benefit to publishers, Hill, a former EVP at Interactive Corp, and his Feedburner cohorts were well-aware — like any content-disseminating medium — that advertising would eventually be involved. “We recognized early on… that this would be an ad-supported media, because any time you start to get a meaningful audience that starts to build new media, then the marketers come calling,” he says.

In response, Feedburner has set up mutually exclusive advertiser and publisher divisions of its service, installing an aggregation system that could lead hapless media buyers on the right path with RSS. “The biggest benefit we provided to the buyers in the marketplace was we created from economy to scale for them,” Hill says. “If you were an agency, or a media planner, or even the interactive marketing director at a company, and feeds were interesting to you as an interactive media, you would have a hard time placing ad dollars a year ago — to be able to aggregate all this free content for these publishers, and bring it to market in a way that’s very efficient for the buyers. The way we’ve done that is we organized the feeds to publishers into content categories—and we have 12 of those content categories—and they’re things like city and technology, consumer electronics, arts and entertainment, and automotive.”

In fact, according to its biz dev VP, it is this specific content aggregation that gives Feedburner leverage over competitors when it comes to advertising gain. “We’ve aggregated more blue chip content than anybody,” Hill boasts. “So we have feeds from great publishers. Secondly, we’ve built an ad server that’s proprietary to feeds and is designed specifically for how people interact with feed content. [For example], there are about 2,500 different user agents that request feeds from us every day. That’s every thing from a feed reader that’s sitting on a mobile phone to something on somebody’s desktop. Some of those are ad-friendly and display a display ad, and some don’t. Feedburner’s got the intelligence to figure out when and how to send an ad to a feed reader. And that’s a big deal to our advertisers that are paying on a per-refresh basis.”