More companies see the spread of RSS as a great way to get their information to users, and profit from advertising placed within those feeds too. Last October, JupiterResearch noted less than 10 percent of RSS feeds had advertising in them, and no major advertisers were using feeds as part of their marketing strategies.
Publishers could be the real winners with RSS advertising. Have you started placing ads in your feeds? Tell us how it’s working for you in WebProWorld.
This October, Google has had to turn away advertisers due to lack of supply.
So what happened between then and now? The Wall Street Journal noted they’ve reached a point of acceptance. ‘RSS feeds “are the next avenue for smart marketers to look to,”‘ Jeff Hinz of Interpublic Group’s ID Media said in the report.
Advertisers have watched the RSS medium grow over the past few years, from its birth through wider spread adoption. Now that the mechanisms for making a site’s feed easily available exist, more sites have been placing them online.
The real appeal of RSS advertising for marketers comes two-fold. First, the medium is strictly opt-in. Users of a particular feed reader may find certain feeds already in place, but any other ones added to the mix are by the user’s choice.
A second appeal comes from the targeted markets advertisers can reach via a feed. Specific interests like gadgets, politics, and health topics all have their followers. For marketers, the problem has changed from finding those markets to serving them ads.
Google has no problem finding advertisers who want to be part of the RSS movement. Its AdSense program is running a test of RSS advertising, with two pricing models, pay per click and pay per impression. Google has far more demand than it has advertising spots available.
Yahoo has been working with FeedBurner to extend its advertising network to RSS feeds. An executive cited by the Journal said the privacy advantage with feeds has helped reduce privacy, as users don’t have to provide personal information to subscribe to a feed.
It’s not just the big players who want a piece of the new RSS ad market. Pheedo’s Bill Flitter, who has been writing about RSS advertising, told the Journal: “Most advertisers are dipping their toes in the water and trying to figure it out. It’s a new medium and people don’t quite understand what it is. It’s like email was back in 1995 and 1996, where it was just text.”
Right now, advertising on RSS resembles early email, in that it’s mostly text based. Site and feed publishers have to be careful not to push advertising too hard at recipients. The appeal of feeds has been that they deliver the content without a barrage of advertising, as is found on sites laden with blocks of advertisements.
A compromise for many publishers has been to provide “partial feeds” to subscribers. The feed from a site contains the opening paragraph of a story. To get the rest, the user has to jump over to the site, where all the advertising is in place.
But a successful RSS advertising approach could benefit site publishers, and their marketers. In April, ClickZ reported about Fred Wilson’s “A VC” blog and the results he had with using AdSense on his web site and Yahoo’s Overture in his RSS feed:
Over three days, Wilson’s blog had 7,450 page views. For those same days, RSS views on his FeedBurner feed were 7,350. These RSS views account for only 30 percent of his total RSS subscribers because, as with many blogs, his RSS views are three times his Web page views. During those days, he had 36 AdSense click-through from his Web pages. He had 10 Overture clicks from his RSS feeds. If similar ads were inserted in the other 70 percent of his RSS feeds, they would very likely produce total click-through numbers that approximated his Web page yield. Wilson’s AdSense ads are optimized for his pages (they’ve been running for over a year). His Overture ads haven’t yet been optimized for his feeds, since this is the first time they ran.
Wilson is now able to generate revenue from his RSS feeds, plus he has real visibility into the audience he’s attracting. He can determine how many people actually view his RSS feeds, rather than just how many feeds were sent, which was all he could do before.
David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business. Email him here.
