Gawker Media Taps the Revenue Potential of RSS

May 19, 2008

There is no doubt that RSS powers a lot of content moving through social networks, widgets, lifestreams and mobile devices. It has been the forgotten technology as the industry has turned their attention to widgets and social networks.

RSS growth surprises many when the hear the numbers. It is used by over 50% of online users according to AvenueA/Razorfish. RSS has been growing under the radar for some time. According to a 2008 study from Universal McCann, RSS use is exploding, growing faster than all other key social media platforms, including social networking and video sharing. According to the study, the number of RSS users jumped 153% between June 2007 and March 2008. Publishers today recognize that their content is increasingly consumed away from their website by their most loyal, dedicated readers. For many top publishers, their page views consumed outside their domain are greater than their website page views.

The growth is not going unnoticed as a source of revenue for many of the top online publishers including Gawker Media. Inline with the growth in RSS usage, Gawker Media has seen their RSS revenue grow nearly 300 percent in the first quarter of 2008 using Pheedo.

"Gawker Media has always made full content feeds available from the beginning, believing that the RSS channel was a valuable and under-levered distribution channel for marketing our content," stated Christopher P. Batty, Vice President of Sales of Gawker Media. "As such, we're highly committed to helping our marketing partners reach our readers thusly."

We have been pioneering RSS advertising since 2003 and were extremely happy to be the source of Gawker's tremendous growth in Q1.

"Outsourcing the RSS feed monetization scheme made more sense than having our sales people focus on it," said Erin Pettigrew, Ad Operations and Research Manager at Gawker. "In the first quarter we saw tremendous growth after the Pheedo implementation. Pheedo was the best solution when we needed it the most."

So hats off to Gawker Media for proving the business model for RSS and syndicated content.

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Posted by Bill Flitter on May 19, 2008 9:51 AM
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