Is all well in RSS Advertising? Depends who you ask.

June 13, 2005

Rok Hrastnik from Marketingstudies.net asked me to jump into the conversation on whether RSS advertising is well. My answer is depends who you ask. If you ask those who are just pumping ads into feeds, they may say no. You ask me, and I say "it's all good." You're thinking of course I would say that. Let me explain.

I think what many of the feed ad pumpers are finding out that putting ads into feeds is a lot harder then they realized. It's not just about servings ads in feeds and they will click. RSS is a new medium that needs to be studied and requires sophisticated tools. Ads need to fit the medium. Taking website ads and jamming them into a feed may not be the best approach. I am sure RSS ad pumpers will continue to do what they do. You can go to your general practitioner for medical advice or you can seek a specialist to cure what ails you. Same with RSS advertising.

Richard MacManus from ionrss.com did a test with Google's RSS ad solution and said the, "results were underwhelming." Fred Wilson from A VC blog had similar results. Richard goes onto say that ads in feeds should be highly targeted, well-branded and extremely contextual. Couldn't agree more. I am positive Google will get there however, it's more than that. We put together a list of best practices for RSS advertising. The best practices are based upon work we've been doing for about 2 years. This list is not just what we think, this list comes from making mistakes, learning and experimenting.

About a year ago, we did an advertising campaign for Sun. This was Sun's first try at RSS advertising. It was a success and they continue to put money into this medium including inserting ads in feeds of the New York Times. This is just one success story of many we've done. We will be publishing more case studies in the next few months.

We have not seen a drop in our publisher's RSS subscribers because of ads. We watch this very closely. Again, if the ad fits the medium, it's relevant to the consumer and follows best practices, why would they unsubscribe. Consumers believe ads are ads when they are not relevant to them; otherwise it's called content or information. And who says an ad has to be "CLICK ME NOW." An ad to Pheedo is anything that generates revenue. An ad could be content. We are testing some really neat ad units for RSS. We'll publish our findings in the near future.

Just like any new ad frontier, it takes a few tries to get it right. It's a growing market. A lot of work to be done. My best advice is be patient. We are working on doing things right. Rok, how about we do some testing together!

Posted on June 13, 2005 11:13 PM
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