How to Buy RSS Advertising - Part I: Setting the Stage - Guest Blogger, Online Revenue News & Opinions Since 1998

This is the first in a three part series covering ?How to Buy RSS Advertising.? In part I below, we?ll set the stage and explain the basics of RSS. Future posts will include putting together a smart RSS advertising media plan and measuring RSS advertising effectiveness.
RSS feeds are quickly becoming mainstream, but publishers, advertisers and consumers are just scratching the surface. Recent data from the Pew Internet Research Foundation shows that a mere 9 percent of the Internet population has a good idea of what RSS is. Don?t be concerned about the numbers quite yet.
RSS is the new email newsletter
RSS is poised to become an important content delivery mechanism in mainstream media. It will soon represent a permanent and fundamental change in the way information will be shared, viewed and acted upon online. It will reshape the way people interact with the web for several reasons.
E-mail SPAM has devastated the sending of legitimate customer communication ? RSS is ?SPAM free?
Many publishers catering to the early adopter and tech markets are seeing 40% month-over-month growth rate in their RSS traffic. Some are seeing 50% of their traffic come from their RSS feed, with a corresponding decline in email subscriptions
RSS is easy-to-use (after the subscription process). Consumers will gravitate to anything that saves them time
RSS was popularized by blogs
RSS has been around for awhile, but it hasn?t been until very recently that there has been a surge in its use. Why now? I believe there are two reasons.
Explosion of blogs
Demand for consumer control
Technorati reports over 900,000 blog posts are created daily. Blog software tools make publishing to the web as simple as typing an email. RSS makes it easy to stay up-to-date with the volume of blog posts. The content comes to you. You no longer have to search for it.
A common misperception is you must have a blog to have an RSS feed. This is not so. RSS has been adopted by major publishers such as CNET, the BBC, Yahoo, Motley Fool, InfoWorld, The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Wired News, The Wall Street Journal and many others, including a rapidly growing contingent of local and regional newspapers.
Era of Consumer Control
From TV and digital video recorders to Radio and Podcasts, consumers are demanding control over their media consumption. For over 50 years, TV and Radio has remained the same. With the advent and popularity of TiVo and Podcasting, both TV and Radio will see dramatic changes in how people interact with and consume these media. Consumers will watch and listen on their time, skip commercials and create their own personal information gathering networks.
Because of RSS, online content consumption is changing too. You can now get your favorite content delivered right to your desktop and read it on your time - without the threat of SPAM clogging your inbox.
In future posts, we?ll explore how advertising will change in the era of consumer control.
RSS is in its Infancy
However, RSS is not perfect. It has a lot of growing up to do. Here are just a few things that will need to change before we see widespread adoption of RSS.
Subscribing to feeds is cumbersome. It is not intuitive
Receiving feeds requires another tool (news aggregator) to adopt
Getting subscriber counts and data requires new enterprise software to employ
I compare the sophistication of RSS today to the first banner ad that ran in 1994. Look where we are today with banners ? animation, Flash, behavioral targeting, Fatboy Ad, affiliate programs etc.
In the future, RSS will carry more then text. Today, it is already the primary distribution channel for podcasts. In the near future, much of the content delivered in the era of the much touted Web 2.0 will come on the backs of RSS feeds.
About Bill Flitter
Bill is the Chief Marketing Officer atPheedo. He spends most of his days thinking about marketing. You could say he‘s a marketing geek. His mission is to re-invent online advertising and make it a medium that once again is enjoyed by consumers.