The R$$ of RSS Panel at OMMA

September 26, 2006

It was just one short year ago that I remember sitting in the audience for the RSS panel at OMMA (there were about 30 or so of my peers looking on with me) thinking “what will this space be like in a year from now?”

Fast forward one year, and Pheedo was not sitting in the audience this time but rather moderating the panel on the topic that is near and dear to us, RSS revenue, or the R$$ of RSS as OMMA calls it.

Let’s look at what’s changed in the year and what we learned from this panel.

First, the audience was over double what it was last year. It was standing room only, and there were a handful of people sitting cross-legged on the floor in the front of the room listening intently to panel.

The RSS advertising space has grown. More publishers have adopted RSS, and the old MarketingSherpa number that stated that 40% of marketers/publishers were thinking of adding feeds is now decidedly low. It’s much higher. In the several conversations I had, there’s no question of “if.” It’s a question of “when.” Oh yeah, and there’s still the question of “what is RSS?” and why should I care.

To our detriment, I skipped the pleasantries of RSS 101. I figured that since we had such a healthy audience, they must all know what RSS is and be here to get in on ‘what’s next’. Well, frankly, RSS in its most basic form, sans ads, sans analytics, is still the ‘what’s next’ for many publishers, including the few that approached me afterward and kindly suggested that we should have ‘better explained’ RSS. I agree. Point taken.

Adam Broitman of Morpheus Media offers a perspective on the session, on which I commented. Adam was certainly one of the more progressive users of RSS in the room yesterday, but he was not, in my analysis, representative of the majority. We’re still in an education and evangelization phase, to some extent.

The one thing that we did not have to convince the audience of was that there are deep seated technological and cultural changes, such as screen-shifting and time-shifting, that necessitate a strategy around RSS and micro-chunked, syndicated content in general.

Some of the session highlights were as follows:

• Jake Dobkin of The Gothamist is seeing a healthy (I think he said 15%) bit of traffic from his feeds, but frankly, at this point, they’re not a huge revenue driver for him.
• Ed Manning of NewsGator gave me new hope for the branded reader and stand-alone feed reader market. From NG’s perspective, it doesn’t make sense for a publisher to say “take my feed, and go read somewhere else” like My Yahoo or some similar reader. NewsGator is enabling publishers to capture the RSS consumer on their own media properties. Brilliant when you think about it for a second. He seemed unfazed by the roar of Internet Explorer 7 talk that was flying around the room.
• Jeff Hinz of ID Media has more experience in RSS ad buying than most agency folks out there. ID was well ahead of the curve two years ago and shared a couple of case examples where RSS was included in the media mix with very positive results. Thanks again for the endorsement, Jeff. Your check is in the mail.
• Scott Cherkin of the Travel Ad Network is bullish on IE 7 being the inflection point for RSS. Once we have a pleasant feed consumption experience, and we stop calling this whole thing “RSS” (also echoed by Ed, who spends time with each of his clients expunging RSS from their vocabulary) and get to something that just connects people with content, we’ll be on our way to ubiquity.

Thanks to everyone what attended the session! We look forward to seeing you next year when we can reflect on all this again and see how far we’ve come!

Posted on September 26, 2006 1:37 PM
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