I got a DM at Unguru.me the other day asking about the origin of the name of FeedFront magazine.
Shawn: Quick question. I listen to every episode of Affiliate Thing, you and Lisa do a great job keeping me in the loop when it comes to the industry as a whole. In the last episode I heard, your ‘4th year anniversary special’, you mentioned you were haunted by not having really mastered Data Feeds. What is confusing me is the fact that you named your print magazine FEED FRONT. For the first several months after I heard of that title I had no idea what it meant, then I assumed that it had to do with data feeds. If data feeds are such an albatross for you, why is the publication named FEED FRONT? This is a question that has been burning inside me for over 25 minutes.
So, I figured I’d clarify the name, and it has nothing to do with those datafeeds, which I still haven’t figured out to my satisfaction.
Back in May 2003, I registered feedfront.com, because the name occurred to me as interesting, and I thought I might be able to do something with it down the road. This was coincidentally the same month affiliatesummit.com was born.
The reason I liked the name feedfront was that it represented sort of the opposite of feedback to me. A concept where people could get valuable information about a project on the front end, so they could make it better before it launched.
The domain sat around, like so many hundreds of other good domain ideas I’d had over the years until Missy Ward and I decided we wanted to start a magazine as part of Affiliate Summit in 2008.
We thought about simply calling it Affiliate Summit magazine, but figured that might pigeonhole the content, and we wanted to create a resource that touched on Internet marketing, social media, search marketing, etc.
So, FeedFront was pulled out of the cobwebs to be the name of our new magazine in spring 2008. The first issue of FeedFront was published in June 2008 with an angelic Jason Calacanis delivering the Affiliate Summit West 2008 keynote on the cover.
So there you have it. The 14th issue of FeedFront magazine is coming out in spring 2011, and we continually strive to provide information on the front end for people, so they can optimize and improve their work.