Marketing Ninja

As Tom from TomsTechBlog has pointed out, a major incident that should have incited many bloggers to question Google’s modus operandi occurred with hardly a peep from the normally boisterous blogosphere.

To recap, FeedBurner’s traffic reporting service went down last weekend – no blogs were able to receive any of their normal traffic information from the service, and yet the blogosphere remained silent. Tom and Michael Krigsman are the only two people who said “hey, shouldn’t we be worried about the total lack of Google’s customer service?”

Google’s entire business model revolves around giving advertisers exposure to massive numbers of potential customers, whether it’s through paid search or through the world’s largest contextual advertising network – they don’t give a shit about people who consume Google’s free services; they’re not Google’s customers!

I’ve had a few discussions with my boss regarding whether or not we should continue syndicating Working Smarter’s readers to a FeedBurner-controlled URL; the idea of questioning FeedBurner/Google’s benignancy must seem insane to many members of the blogosphere, but here’s why we’re considering it:

• Google has no reason to respond to you during service outages; all of your readers are entirely dependent on FeedBurner and Google. What the hell are you going to do if the quality of the service degrades? Plead and beg with your users to switch all of their feeds to a new URL? Good luck!
• Google has all of the control; you control the content, but when you use FeedBurner you’ve ceded control of your readership to Google. This means that you have to accept whatever Google does if it changes the terms of FeedBurner’s service in the future. Even if you can get most of your loyal readers to switch you’re still going to lose a large chunk of your audience (and your blog’s value) in the transition.
• Worst of all, what if Google decides to start a per-subscriber fee to all blogs; this may be a bit radical, but let’s suppose that Google decides to charge any blogger who uses FeedBurner $1/year for all of their subscribers. Big, popular blogs run by private individuals, like 25 Hours a Day, will become too expensive to maintain; I doubt that Dare has an extra $80,000k a year in disposable income that he’d be willing to donate just to keep his blog running.

I don’t buy the notion that Google is a benign company just trying to fight for the common good on the Internet; the fact is that it’s a multi-billion dollar goliath with one concern: it’s bottom line. If Google decides that it’s in its best financial interest to rob bloggers at gunpoint then I don’t think that it will hesitate to do so. Do I think it’s likely to happen? No, but can it happen? Absolutely.

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