Lifestreaming Will Change How Advertisers Approach Media - Part 1

June 16, 2008

There is a lot of buzz and activity around social networking. One of the most interesting opportunities emerging out of this phenomenon is Lifestreaming. When people hang out with friends online they talk about music, review movies, share travel stories, exchange photos, discuss videogames, recommend books and chat about life. Lifestreaming offers the ability to store and broadcast this information exchange. People now have the ability to create, aggregate and publish their interests and activities. By leveraging feeds to publish information - people are creating content that reflects their life. This is Lifestreaming - this time-ordered flow of information (akin to a living diary) about a person's life.

A Lifestream is only limited by the content and sources each person defines. People typically choose a few online services that track their activities such as Flickr (photos they take), Last.fm (music they like), and Del.icio.us (bookmarking). These online services provide RSS feeds of a person's activities - these feeds are enabling Lifestreaming. Lifestreaming is the aggregation and merging of multiple RSS feeds into a single point of entry. Once the feeds are setup, the data is added automatically to a Lifestream. The output is a concentrated unique stream of information comprised of a person's ideas, beliefs, passions, thoughts, and interests - that defines who they are.

Thanks to the popularity of sites like LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace and FriendFeed, the act of Lifestreaming offers a new way to keep people informed - whether for business, friendship or family. As a result, each Lifestream has its followers, the audience. Lifestreams make recommendations and keep followers updated and informed. People now have the ability to self promote and re-broadcast content and online media services via a single point of access, which they control, out to their followers. And - critical to the value of a Lifestream, is the ability to leverage this content for search, discovery, and networking. As a result, Lifestreams become human powered recommendation engines.

With Lifestreaming, people now have the ability to subscribe to people they trust who have already chosen and filtered content for them. Followers of Lifestreams are by default, leveraging a human filter to access information. By selectively following Lifestreams people are changing how they access information - people vs. technology - acting as the filter and search engine mechanism. Lifestreaming can be understood as the ultimate human filter.

So, what does this mean to publishers, advertisers, and brands? Lifestreaming is causing a paradigm shift. Just as RSS feeds have changed how users consume their online information, Lifestreaming is evolving as the next generation of media consumption and social networking. The major shift going forward - people (their Lifestreams) acting as the online information filter. Why is this? Because people will subscribe to people (to Lifestreams) to access information - information that has already been filtered. As a result, publishers have a key opportunity to leverage Lifestreams as a new traffic driver. Advertisers have the potential to communicate with this new channel - talking to a captive and trusting audience. And brands have a new model to leverage when defining themselves.

RSS feeds are one of the critical building blocks of Lifestreaming. Brands who have an understanding of what is RSS and how to effectively use it are positioned to best leverage this new channel. Analytics are the key to understanding the Lifestream audiences and needed to target appropriate effective messaging. This is also why it is critical that content pushed through this channel informs, educates, and entertains if the messages are to find success being seen and heard. This is one of the first times; publishers and advertisers alike are being invited into their audiences' personal and private online conversations.

Think of a Lifestream as an interactive digital diary. Then you will understand why Lifestreaming is gaining momentum within the social networking community and changing social media advertising. People are very excited about aggregating all of their information in one place. With all the different sites available - this just makes sense. Whether advertisers and publishers will learn quickly enough how to leverage this captive audience who is choosing them, choosing their content and influencing their followers - well - only time will tell.

Posted on June 16, 2008 2:18 PM
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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.

Continue reading "Gawker Media Taps the Revenue Potential of RSS" »

Posted on May 19, 2008 9:51 AM
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Learn How Cisco Uses RSS to Driving Leads and Traffic

April 16, 2008

The internet has changed how consumers move through the sales process from awareness to consideration to conversion. If a brand attempts to influence it must also change. The three pillars of the sales process have been connected for the first time. Now brands need to create a stream of content to keep consumers engaged at every step of the way.

B-to-B marketers have know this. They have been talking about prospecting and lead nuturing for years. They are engaging prospects through whitepapers, webinars and today, RSS Feeds. Content is no longer anchored to a website. It can flow freely around the web.

We worked with Cisco's agency, Connect Direct, to leverage Cisco's content to engage users across the Pheedo RSS content network.

Connect Direct's President & Founder, Howard Sewell, explains how he leveraged Pheedo's technology.

Working with Pheedo, CDI is now able to:

• serve client ads within a network of RSS feeds, tailored by channels (ex: IT Professionals, Consumer Technology) or even specific feeds (ex: Wired, Dr. Dobbs) that are most relevant to the client's target audience, offer, or product category

• develop and place so-called "feed-powered" ads, either in-feed or on traditional Websites, in which the client's ad is populated by dynamic content powered by the client's own RSS feed

See Howards' full explanation on how B-to-B marketers can leverage RSS to engage prospects throughout the sales process.

Posted on April 16, 2008 2:12 PM
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John Todor on Engaging Prospects the Pheedo Way

February 27, 2007

John Todor, author of "Addicted Customers" and managing partner of The Whetstone Edge, came by the Pheedo office a few weeks ago to discuss our FeedPoweredâ„¢ ads and strategies for engaging customers. We filmed the conversation and made the content of a Pheedo branded FeedPowered ad (right sidebar of the blog).

John has since written a great report about engaging prospects and customers using Pheedo's FeedPowered ad as an example and case study. John views customer engagement largely from a psychological perspective, focusing on getting customers emotionally and psychologically involved with your brand and your company. This is a great read for any marketer looking for new and innovative ways to engage customers and leverage prospects and customers as influencers.

Engaging Customers:
"Getting Prospects Engaged - the Pheedo Way!"

Posted on February 27, 2007 9:49 PM
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Pheedo RSS Feed Stats Now In DoubleClick

Starting today, advertisers and publishers using Pheedo's RSS ad serving technology and DoubleClick to track ad performance will now be able to view Pheedo feed ad performance within the DoubleClick management interface. We worked closely with DoubleClick to solve the technical issues. Now, our joint customers will have a holistic view of their marketing efforts across all of their inventory. We will continue to integrate with other 3rd-party ad management services.

As a part of our goal to help you "do more with feeds" and make money from your RSS content, Pheedo is working to make both our in-feed and on-site ad offerings, including the new FeedPoweredâ„¢ ads, easily integrated and compatible with other feed and content management systems as well as ad management services, like DoubleClick. This DoubleClick integration is just a piece of that bigger puzzle for helping marketers work with Pheedo anytime, anywhere. Stay tuned for more.

Posted on February 27, 2007 9:16 PM
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Introducing FeedPoweredâ„¢ Ads

February 13, 2007

We started Pheedo more than three years ago with the goal of creating solutions to help people do more with RSS and make money from their RSS content. What started with a simple analytics engine evolved into our leading ad-serving technology, and today we are introducing the next step in our work to help publishers and advertisers alike get the most out of RSS content - FeedPowered Ads.

You can read about announcement specifics and reactions in our press release, on TechCrunch, BusinessWeek and right here in our own Pheedo FeedPowered video ad unit (see the right side bar below "Events"). It is a FeedPowered Video unit pulling in a YouTube RSS feed. The content is a series of videos created to explain the FeedPowered Ad platform (practice what you preach, right?) Feed readers will need to click through to the blog.

Essentially, FeedPowered ads are a platform for publishers and advertisers to move their RSS content around the web and give consumers the tools to interact and engage with that content and begin the word of mouth and viral marketing process. Today's on-site advertising generally looks to target a hard-to-find "ready-to-buy" audience that leads to a low click-through rate - FeedPowered ads reach out to a wider range of consumers and give them options other than just clicking through to a website - these include bookmarking, tagging, emailing and subscribing to the feed.

Advertisers such as Coke, Ford and other big name brands are creating a huge amount of content today and it resides primarily on their websites. FeedPowered Ads give marketers a way to free this content from their site and distribute it around the web, extend their marketing reach, and target new sets of potential customers.

Opera Software, one of the early testers of FeedPowered Ads has gained more than 1,000 new subscribers to its RSS feeds from within the new ad unit and garnered click-through rates approaching 10% on their FeedPowered Ads.

All you need to start is a logo and a feed. The ads can be served on our network, your network or through your favorite ad server, and fully tracked throughout the life of your campaigns.

We think this is a big step in online advertising, and a testament to the power of RSS. If you'd like to get started, sign-up here.

Posted on February 13, 2007 3:15 PM
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Pubvertisers and what do with with all that content?

February 12, 2007

Bill Wise wrote a couple weeks ago in Mediapost Search Insider about the rise of what he calls pubvertisers - meaning advertisers producing content. And this is not ad creative or catchphrases, this is real content including websites, whitepapers and a whole lot of online video.

For example, Ford recently created a microsite around the Detroit auto show with content about new cars, concept cars and general news from the show. Coca Cola is hosting a user generated video contest and has been offering music content for years. Big brand name companies are creating substantive content.

We've been seeing this phenomenon at Pheedo first hand for a while now. Companies, ranging from traditional publishers like CMP to e-commerce based companies like Expedia, are creating lots of content that for the most part just rests on their sites, and also, many times in RSS feeds - and they want to do more with it.

One of the main reasons for this pubvertiser content creation is that it improves search results. More content equals better SEO, and it is very well indexed by the engines.

Second, this content helps build relationships with potential customers outside of the "click here" and "buy now" environment found in most online marketing. Consumers can stay in touch with the company no matter what level of the buying process they are at, and hopefully will become future customers.

The latter reason requires this content to be made available to a mass of people though, and just having it reside on a company website - or even distributed via an email newsletter - does not accomplish that. The big question is how can 'pubvertisers' really put their content to work? Content needs to be spread around the web and consumers need to be provided the tools to spread it further and increase the viral and word of mouth potential of the content.

We've seen the demand, and have been working on a platform here at Pheedo to help this growing group of pubvertisers move their content away from the website, and broadcast it around the web It will enable consumers to interact with it in a variety of ways to extend the distribution of the content and reach more consumers at all levels of the buying process. And it's all based on RSS, of course.

Stay tuned...

Posted on February 12, 2007 7:35 AM
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Pheed Read #4 - RSS & The Automotive Industry

December 20, 2006

Executive Summary
The Pheed Read is back, and this time out we’re taking a different approach to our data. In Pheed Read #3, we discussed the issue of full text feeds vs. summary feeds and observed user behavior on clicking through from feeds to websites. Full and summary feeds garnered basically the same click through rates, and 90% percent of readers consumed feed content within their RSS aggregators regardless of the length of the feed item – conclusion being, RSS users are not visiting websites often, and should be marketed to at the feed level.

This time out, in Pheed Read #4, we will be analyzing the data from a specific Pheedo content channel – the automotive category. RSS is emerging as one of the most targeted online mediums for advertisers and the analysis of a single category demonstrates that each content category and its associated readership are different, and marketing strategies should be customized to reach the intended audience. On to the numbers and analysis.

Key Pheed Read Findings Include:

• Feed reader market share statistics show drastic differences from other categories
• Headline-only feeds garner twice the CTR of summary feeds
• Auto category shows high rate of growth month over month and in Q4 of 2006, outpacing all other feed categories
• Most auto publishers offer headline and summary feeds
• Auto-enthusiasts are a financially diverse group
• More than three-quarters of auto category consumers are over the age of 35

Headline Feeds vs. Summary Feeds
Summary feeds make up 63% of automotive feeds in the Pheedo network, while the remainder consists of headline feeds. Unlike other categories in the Pheedo Network (which include entertainment, technology and travel, among others), there are no automotive content publishers that offer full-text feeds. To build on previous Pheed Read reports, we analyzed the click through rates (CTR) on the content (clicking through to the website) for each of these feed formats, within the automotive content channel:

• Headline feeds: 33% CTR on content
• Summary feeds: 15% CTR on content

Headline feeds garner more than twice the CTR of summary feeds. In Pheed Read #3, we found that about 90% of readers of full and summary feeds stay within the aggregator and do not click through to the website. The auto category data shows a departure from previous, broad based research and illustrates clearly that when headline feeds are offered to consumers, the content click through rate is significantly higher indicating that less people stay within their aggregator.  However, the feed offering is only one element in the equation leading to higher CTR, as we’ll see next in the discussion on feed reader preferences.

Automotive Channel Feed Reader Market Share

Feed reader market share is a commonly tracked statistic in the RSS market, and Pheedo has tracked feed reader market share data since issuing Pheed Read #1, showing consistent results across the board in past analyses. Bloglines has taken top honors in prior reports with around 30% of the market followed by Yahoo! with about 15%.

A key aspect of feed reader preference that marketers and publishers should consider is the format in which each reader presents feeds – each RSS reader presents feeds slightly differently, impacting how publishers and marketers should format their content. Overall, our findings in the automotive channel were pretty surprising and a marked departure from past reports, showing that each content category impacts behavior, and that trends cannot necessarily be applied across RSS readership in general, without also considering the flavor of the content:

Yahoo! takes the leadership position with more than half of the market share with Firefox coming in second at 18%. Bloglines drops significantly with just 7% of the market.

While the feed aggregator type analysis is certainly not the end of the story on the high CTR on headline-only feeds that we discussed earlier, it is a key piece of the puzzle. The first two reader types in our analysis, the Yahoo! and Firefox readers (pre-Firefox 2.0, which renders feeds differently) display only the feed headline in their default state, which naturally leads to a higher CTR as readers MUST click through the headline to obtain additional content. 

Automotive Channel Growth vs. RSS Feed Growth
Impressions in the auto category show a growth rate of 38% month over month growth. This is a rapidly growing category. From July to November 2006, the total impression growth of the auto category has grown more than 500% with the last quarter of 2006 showing the highest rates of growth.

Automotive Channel Demographics
We broke down the auto category by several demographics including age, gender and household income. While there is data out there that indicates these statistics for RSS in general, it is valuable to break out the auto vertical as the results (as with feed reader market share) do vary from general RSS statistics.

Age: more than 75% of auto category consumers are over the age of 35. The “coveted” 18 to 24 year old demographic is not the sweet spot when it comes to marketing in auto focused RSS feeds. They make up only 3% of the total audience:

Gender: male readers represent close to two-thirds of the auto category audience:

Household income data: Each demographic other than the $150,000+ group holds a roughly equal share in auto category readership (~20%). Financially, auto enthusiasts are a diverse group:

The Car Connection Story
One of the auto category publishers included in the Pheed Read report data is The Car Connection, an award-winning automotive site offering a complete editorial source for news and reviews, spy shots and shopping guides, tips and expert advice.

When the publishers of The Car Connection first heard about RSS integration into Internet Explorer 7 and the resulting mass audience that would be exposed to the medium, they decided to ramp up RSS efforts and offer their content to readers via feeds. Paul Eisenstein, publisher of The Car Connection, says that the site has seen significant growth in their RSS feeds, and that it is the fastest growing content delivery method for The Car Connection.

The Car Connection offers headline feeds and a short one-line description of the article in the body of the feed. Advertisements are presented as a standalone item in the feed. The Car Connection formats their feeds to drive people to The Car Connection website, but also markets within the feed, to reach those consumers who stay in the aggregator, and monetize their content at the feed level. The Car Connection takes a hybrid approach to their feeds by using it as both a way to drive more traffic to their site and as a monetization tool.

In 2007, The Car Connection plans to increase its RSS publishing efforts and engage in new programs to increase RSS readership and monetize RSS content.

Third Party Data
To add perspective and insight to our home-grown Pheedo data, we’ve taken a glance at recent findings from other sources. A few highlights:

• Online advertising spending continues to grow at a fast clip: U.S. online advertising spending is expected to reach a record-setting $16.7 billion this year, up from $12.5 billion last year, according to online marketing analyst group eMarketer.
• Online video advertising spend is on a rapid upswing. According to a survey from the American Advertising Federation, more than half (53%) of the 168 respondents said they expect 20% or more of their TV advertising budgets to shift into online video by 2010.
• eMarketer also predicts that automotive spending will account for 15 percent of online ad dollars in 2007, to the tune of $2.7 billion.
• Automotive publishers are seeing a high demand for web ad inventory: according to Kevin Considine, vp of national sales for Cars.com [as reported by MediaWeek’s Mike Shields, 12/4/06], close to 88 percent of Cars.com inventory is sold out for next year, with most brands increasing their budgets by anywhere from 20 percent to 100 percent.
• PQ Media Alternative Media Research Series reports that spending on blog, podcast and RSS advertising is projected to climb another 144.9% in 2006 to $49.8 million.

It's no secret that online advertising is on the rise, and that marketers are looking for new mediums to tap to reach new audiences. Online publishers focused on producing automotive-related content are seeing some of the fastest growth with inventory at sites such as Cars.com almost sold out for all of next year. New online, social mediums such as RSS, blogs present a new medium for these advertisers looking to expand their advertising reach. And from the data presented above, it appears we will start to see marketers spending more and more in these areas.

Conclusions
The auto category is a fast growing online content channel, and as auto manufacturers shift more and more ad dollars to online media, RSS is taking a large chunk of new media marketing efforts.

The data shows that different categories’ readers interact with RSS feeds differently, which presents a challenge to marketers trying to make a broad ad buy across several categories, but also demonstrates the highly targeted nature of RSS feeds. The intricacies of RSS usage should not be seen as barriers, because they in fact give more insight to marketers on who their audience is, and how to target them.

Based on the Pheedo data and findings from across the field of marketing research, we can offer the following take-aways:

1. Automotive web sites should increase their available inventory in high growth areas (RSS) as brands shift dollars online in 2007;
2. RSS/Blogs and social media in general represent new opportunities for the auto industry;
3. Overall RSS usage amongst Auto enthusiasts is growing steadily;
4. Trends in video and rich media highlight additional areas for growth in syndicated content channels as consumers’ desire for RSS-fed information and affinity for online video converge.

Download a PDF of Pheedo's Pheed Read #4 here

The official press release on the latest Pheed Read is here.

Posted on December 20, 2006 12:12 PM
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Feed Publishing Best Practices

November 29, 2006

Niall Kennedy has put together a great resource entitled "Feed Publishing Best Practices." Appears to be written for the non-techie.

Posted on November 29, 2006 4:27 PM
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Feed Powered Advertising

November 19, 2006

Picture this: An ad unit that's easy to create, changes dynamically with RSS, and increases subscriptions to your RSS feeds...

We've been holding our tongues at Pheedo to chime in on our work on what folks are calling feed powered advertising. Initial iterations of this concept (by TechMeme and Federated Media for example) use blog posts as the content for advertising. It's a great idea, and it's just the start. At Pheedo, we've been developing a similar ad format. We've made it scalable by leveraging our existing technology. That means any advertiser with an RSS feed can use it. More importantly, it will be available to all publishers in our network very shortly. We launched a preliminary, basic version with PRWeb some time ago and have been working on further enhancements for some time as the interest in RSS from all corners heats up.

Here's a glimpse into the feed powered ad solution we've been testing over the past few weeks on a number of blogs and sites in the Pheedo network.

Why is this different? First off, let's look at the state of RSS advertising and divide it into two different types:

1. In-Feed Advertising
2. RSS Powered Advertising

Pheedo has been doing "in-feed" advertising for our clients for more than two years now, and while RSS adoption is growing, in-feed advertising is just the beginning of the overall RSS marketing story. The available in-feed inventory still only represents a small percentage of online inventory. But RSS content doesn't need to be limited to feeds - it can be used as a dynamic marketing message, which leads us to RSS feed powered advertising.

This is conversational advertising at its best, a topic that's been near and dear to me since we started Pheedo. It's about letting marketers use RSS content in a new way and 'move' that content to engage customers and attract new subscribers.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. We are currently testing our feed powered platform with several top brands and we'll keep you posted over the coming weeks and months. If you would like to take part in our beta testing, and promote your content and grow feed subscribers, contact us.

Posted on November 19, 2006 9:00 PM
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The Revenue Streams of 2007: RSS

November 15, 2006

According to EcontentMag.com, 2007 is the year for revenue strategies around RSS.

"RSS finally came into its own last year, as Google and Yahoo! made it invisible. Now you just "subscribe" to headlines and leave the XML, Atom, and RSS garbage to the dweebs where it belongs. As a result, some B2B trade news sites claim that almost 50% of their overall volume comes from feeds. In the consumer categories, even in those like celebrity not associated with tech-savvy users, the RSS traffic is formidable.

However, having more users coming in via the side door (rather than the home page) may mean that publishers need to rethink their layouts, perhaps even their ad inventory. Every article page must merchandise the rest of the content the way a front page would. Whether RSS feeds themselves monetize as ad vehicles is a call I am not willing to make at this point, but they may start changing how we monetize the site itself."

We will see big things for RSS in 2007 including subscriber growth and innovate revenue strategies. Publishers will be forced to pay more attion to RSS as subscribers increase and website page impressions flatten.

However, RSS does drives targeted impressions to your website. If an RSS subscriber clicks through to read a full article, one thing you know is that the content is of high interest to the reader. Website impressions, as a result of an RSS subscriber, should command a higher CPM for the ads surrounding the content as it is a very targeted loyal reader.

Prediction: 2007 is THE year of RSS.

Posted on November 15, 2006 5:48 PM
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10 Ways for E-Marketers to Use RSS

October 26, 2006

I had the honor of participating on the panel on the uses of RSS for marketers at the DMA's annual conference. The panel consisted of the founder of Bloglines, Mark Fletcher, and Heidi Cohen of Clickz.

In an article today on Clickz, Heidi highlights the conversation. Below is the summary.

Here are 10 ways to extend your e-tail marketing using RSS (note: some of these can be used by content marketers as well):

* Drive traffic and purchasers. Use RSS feeds to distribute time-sensitive information, such as weekly travel specials and niche content. Some implementations can put consumers directly into the shopping process.

* Set up existing customers to receive RSS feeds. In this case, there's often one individual per URL. A Silverpop financial client, for example, regularly distributes reports to its customer base this way.

* Advertise on content providers' feeds. Use providers such as FeedBurner and Pheedo. FeedBurner has found ads that engage readers to sign up for RSS alerts for special offers perform better than ads for a specific product.

* Create channels for affiliate communications to distribute marketing content. Use RSS to enhance affiliate communications by developing links that allow you to automatically push updates.

* Expand rich media distribution. Use podcasting, videocasting, and PDFs to create broader reach for your marketing message.

* Distribute content to other devices (mobile phones, iPods, PDAs, etc.). A mobile RSS reader can be an easier solution to implement than an SMS one. When creating content for those devices, consider the environment in which the user will consume your content.

* Extend site content with feeds from other sites and blogs. In this case, you're using syndicated information to supply related content on your site.

* Develop partnerships to cross-promote with relevant content sites to build traffic. Use RSS to attract a content site's readers to your product.

* Repurpose rich content, such as white papers, into smaller chunks. Use small pieces of content to engage readers and lure them to your site for further information. Think about this content in a sequential way. This can work well for business-to-business (B2B) marketers.

* Create Web widgets that are fun to use and viral and that include RSS feeds. You can develop a widget, for instance, that provides tips and tricks for your product, especially if you've got a product for which consumers are evangelical, such as hybrid cars.

Posted on October 26, 2006 10:11 AM
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RSS Advertising Goes Global

October 18, 2006

I was so busy yesterday at the DMA annual conference in San Francisco, I forgot to write about our new RSS ad optimization feature - geo-targeting capabilities for RSS feeds and on-site ads. To read more about it, check out this story from ClickZ.

Andy Evans, managing director of London based Net Communities Limited, has been using this new feature with success to target IT professionals in London. "We are pleased that Pheedo has implemented geo-targeting - all of our partners have enjoyed newfound revenues and increased click through rates and ROI for their advertisers by ensuring that users only see ads that are applicable to their region."

The benefit to Geo-targeting with Pheedo is now advertisers can target customers around the world based on the country they are in and convert more leads - it is one more lever we can pull in optimizing performance of ads in Feeds. Geo-targeting is not new to website ads but it is a very big development in RSS advertising. We had to overcome a few challenges first to do it correctly.

Advertisers can choose from our many RSS ad unit options and target audiences in any combination of more than 230 countries and territories. Now, RSS provides a highly targeted online advertising medium not only by subject and demographic, but also by location. As the market grows, this geographic targeting will become more and more granular allowing advertisers to continue to hone their targeting.

Posted on October 18, 2006 5:12 PM
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Survey Says, Retailers to Shift Some Marketing Dollars to RSS

October 5, 2006

BizRates' just released 2006 eHoliday Mood Survey includes an interesting marketing statistic: 41.6 percent of retailers will incorporate blogs or RSS feeds into their holiday marketing strategy. While not quite as surprising, the study also notes that 97.4 percent of retailers said they would invest in search engine marketing this holiday season.

Search is content you are looking for while RSS is content you have already found and subscribe to - content you want. The intentions of the two audiences are different, but both mediums attract a valuable audience. It could be argued that the RSS audience is more valuable because the RSS user has identified exactly what they want while the search user is still looking and their intent is not clear. By subscribing to an RSS feed, we know the RSS user has an interest in a particular content category. And, we can assume the user is making a longer-term commitment by having subscribed to the feed as he or she will likely read the content on a regular basis.

RSS has not reached the mass volume of users that search has, but it can provide that edge you need to improve your Holiday '06 sales. As search keyword prices skyrocket during the holidays, RSS feeds offer a cost effective alternative marketing medium to explore and can help you get revenues back in the black.

Posted on October 5, 2006 10:10 PM
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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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5 Tips to Ready Your Blog for Big Brand Advertising

September 21, 2006

The proliferation of mediums such as blogs and RSS feeds has resulted in many brand-name advertisers allocating more money to new media advertising budgets. While ad spends are still not as large for new media as for traditional media, there is an increasing amount of money being spent that publishers big and small can take advantage of. But, because of the sheer number of blogs, advertisers are selective about where to advertise on, so just having a blog does not guarantee big brand advertising.

Thankfully, making your blog more attractive to name-brand advertisers is not that difficult, and the following five steps will help you ready your blog for advertisers and ultimately will make you more money:

Continue reading 5 Tips to Ready Your Blog for Big Brand Advertising at Revenews.

Posted on September 21, 2006 5:38 PM
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WKRN Blogger Meetup Follow-up

September 10, 2006

Thanks to Mike Sechrist, Terry Heaton and the crew at WKRN in Nashville for putting together a stellar blogger meet-up this past Saturday. Nashvilleistalking.com is their amazing citizen media project that's brought together about 500 bloggers from the Nashville area to contribute not only to their own blogs but also to the Nashville Is Talking aggregator blog. There were between 40-70 bloggers there when I counted and not a one of them was live blogging (save for a post or two on their Treos)

Steve Safran posted a few good wrap-ups of the speakers and attendees over at LostRemote.com. There were a couple of comments with questions on Pheedo and RSS ads, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to clear things up a bit.

"Dan" asked:

I’m trying to “get” how RSS helps me sell more stuff. I went to the Pheedo site and still am so dense. I don’t understand. Could you (explain) it to me?

Dan (and Steve), here's some thoughts on RSS advertising, assuming that you're in the game to sell stuff. Though, the presentation at the event was for bloggers and was all about getting ads into your feeds, it's good to see that there are advertisers lurking out there too! I left a comment on the blog, but it appears that comment moderation is turned on for anything that has a URL address in it, so here's my response.

Dan & Steve,

Sorry if the RSS advertising message isn’t clear. Let me try to clear things up a bit.

Dan, I presume that you’re seeking to be an advertiser, as you’re interested in how RSS helps you sell more stuff. I don’t know that it’s any more complicated than saying that RSS advertising is not unlike any other ad medium in that, well, it’s advertising. It is, however, quite unlike any other medium when you think of the opportunity to reach a very niche audience based on content category (more on our content categories here: http://www.pheedo.com/node/17).

The point that Steve Safran made about the percentages is that RSS readers stay in the aggregator environment around 90% of the time, and only click through on CONTENT items about 8-12% of the time. Ergo, there’s a great opportunity to reach RSS readers with your brand message while in the aggregator environment. I say brand message because unlike search, where users are seeking content/information with a certain ‘intent’ (purchase?), in RSS, they are necessarily seeking things with intent, thus a higher frequency branding campaign tends to be more effective.

I’m happy to expand on this more if you’d like. Drop me an email at: dana [at] pheedo.com

Posted on September 10, 2006 8:05 AM
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Could Coca-Cola Become the Next Time Inc or NBC?

August 26, 2006

For some time, we have been writing about "Conversational Advertising"

We describe Conversational Advertising like this:

In the world of Conversational Advertising, the audience rules. Conversational Advertising understands it's all about trust between a publisher and her audience. It uses the characteristics of Weblogs to create effective campaigns. It gives customers ownership in the advertising process. No longer are ads 'thrown' at consumers because some marketer decides what is best for the customer. Customers can now interact more openly with the brand and discuss likes and dislikes. Advertising becomes part of the content.

Not only is advertising becoming part of the content, it is the content. MediaPost provides a few examples from Gillette to Dove to BMW Films. Advertisers are starting to create content - content as advertising. This goes beyond advertorials.

This is not a new concept. The early soap operas were sponsored by laundry and cleaning items. These jingles were to entertain and tell a story.

We will continue to see advertisers creating compelling content vs. advertising. The companies MediaPost points to are just the beginning. To some degree, they are competing with TV, radio and print.

Look for the Coke channel coming to your local cable station. The trend of big brand marketers creating compelling content that we "tune into" is a trend that will continue across all mediums.

Posted on August 26, 2006 7:31 AM
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RSS: Don't be Fooled by the Numbers. Powerful Medium Set to Explode

August 22, 2006

Steve Rubel pulls data from an Ad Age (login required) piece that discusses the state of blog, RSS and podcast marketing, and shows that usage numbers of these mediums is not all that impressive. I agree with Steve's points, that while small, the audiences for social media are very influential and growing quickly.

Ad Age states that marketing in these mediums is a little premature, but this all sounds just like the many reports circulating in the early 1990s about adoption and marketing in email and online in general. The results were the same - low adoption, not a lot of hope... but look at us now.

Forrester claims that 6% of the Internet population was using RSS in 2005. If we go back to their report from 2004, this is a 300% increase over 2004 usage (2%). Many predict 2007 will be the year of major RSS subscriber growth. This is when IE7 and RSS will be integrated within Microsoft products.

From an advertising perspective, though the RSS population is still small, they are the cream of the online crop. This 6% of Internet users represents many of the most active people on the Internet, visiting the most sites and sifting through the most content.

It's refreshing to see these types of reports. People know there is something big brewing (hence the large amount of people writing about RSS and social media), but just as in the early 1990s, because the numbers don't quite add up yet, there are still many skeptics. But we've been here before, just wait and see?

Posted on August 22, 2006 4:25 PM
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The RSS and SEO Connection: RSSeo!

August 10, 2006

Pheedo released a beta version of a brand new product today: RSSeo. The new product leverages publishers' RSS content to increase the likelihood of their findability within the major search engines.

While many publishers now have RSS feeds, they are not yet being used to improve search engine performance. RSS feeds remain an untapped resource for SEO...until now! All you need are RSS feeds, Pheedo and RSSeo take care of the rest. RSSeo is a great tool to enhance your search engine optimization strategy.

Visit the Pheedo RSSeo page to find out more about becoming a beta test publisher.

Posted on August 10, 2006 3:17 PM
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It's Christmas Time!

July 16, 2006

Christmas in July, that is. I know it sounds premature, and maybe you just got around to returning some of those sweaters and useless gadgets you got for Christmas last year, but to stay competitive in the holiday shopping frenzy, retailers need to start gearing up for the holiday rush early.

It's always surprising to me how every year holiday advertising and marketing appears earlier and earlier, but the bottom line is, retailers need to be among the first to get through to consumers because as soon as they are presented with the right product at the right price, they will not hesitate to buy it.

This year, with RSS adoption on the rise, RSS is the logical choice for retailers to try out as a new marketing tool to directly communicate with potential customers and help them build shopping lists. How can you create shopping lists via RSS, you ask? Here's how:

• Consumer opts-in to receive RSS feeds from various retailers about certain products, product categories or just for general browsing.
• They now have a list of contenders for their business that they will monitor for deals, new products, etc. - a virtual shopping list and personal shopper.
• When presented with the right product at the right price, the consumer simply clicks through to your website to complete the purchase - RSS has turned the shopper into a buyer.
• Since they are subscribed to your RSS feed, the customer is interested in your business and can still be marketed to for other products for future business.

It's simple for the consumer and the retailer, and keeps the customer in-touch with your business even after the transaction is complete. Browsing a website or even a store may lead to a purchase being made, but no line of communication has been established and the customer may no longer return to or even think about your retail business again this holiday season. The customer has opted-in to your feeds to hear what you have to offer, so communicate!

Already have RSS feeds set up? Great! Need to start new ones? Not a problem. Either way, here's how to kick off a successful retail RSS marketing campaign for the holidays.

• Implement RSS feeds easily using services from companies like Nooked, SimpleFeed or PRESSFeed.
• Create several feeds for consumers to choose from: new products, hot deals, holiday promotions, and various product categories. Or, let the user create customized RSS feeds with just the content they want to receive.
• Grow your feeds through the Pheedo Feed Growth program by displaying RSS ads throughout the Pheedo network promoting your feeds and business.
• Analyze RSS usage with detailed analytics to optimize your feeds and content before the real holiday rush begins.
• Keep your creative fresh with new deals, products and even contests posted regularly.

Starting an RSS campaign is easy, and very low-cost - especially when compared to maintaining an email list. Furthermore, RSS allows you to keep customers updated in real time. If a price changes, a new product comes in or you want to change something you previously published, RSS makes it easy and alerts the customer of the changes. The equivalent can only be accomplished with email by completely flooding customers' inboxes - they generally don't like that.

I will continue to write about the value of RSS for retailers in the coming months as the holiday season approaches because I see RSS as a revolutionary medium for retailers to help establish meaningful lines of communication and relationships with potential customers and customers you want to retain for future business.

Posted on July 16, 2006 10:22 PM
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The Video and RSS Connection

June 27, 2006

As the number of RSS subscribers continues to grow and video content becomes more prevalent online, publishers are using different methods and formats to deliver video to their viewers.

RSS is emerging as an efficient content delivery method for video that provides easy publishing for video content producers and a simple, yet rich user experience for consumers.

Continue Reading: I Want My RSS: The Video And RSS Connection

Posted on June 27, 2006 5:51 PM
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Broadband Users 3x More Likely to Use RSS

June 24, 2006

Not a big surprise that broadband users are 3x more likely to use RSS over narrow-band users as reported by Nielsen//NetRatings. What is surprising is that they lead with this in the headline of the press release. This tells me RSS is a big news draw. As Dana Gardner and I discussed, look for 2007 to be THE big growth year for RSS. When a research company like this is putting resources in tracking RSS usage and see it as a big draw to get people to read the press release, it tells me RSS has arrived.

Posted on June 24, 2006 10:58 PM
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RSS Fit to Print

June 21, 2006

A while back, I wrote about the print media industry, specifically newspapers and how RSS can help stop the bleeding from a revenue perspective. John Gartner at MarketingShift offers another great solution to help newspapers increase readership and grow revenue by using customized and formatted RSS feeds with ads that allow for easy printing.

This is a great idea and speaks to the essence of what makes RSS great – putting the user in control. With customized feeds, the user can read the feeds on his computer, print them out and read them on the train or download them to a mobile device – and all of this would be customized to the reading preferences of the individual reader.

For those who say they need a tangible printed form of the morning news, this solution works great. Same goes for people who only read the news online. Addicted to your Blackberry during the ride to work? RSS is for you!

And or course, for Pheedo’s folks in the Green Bay office, you’ll never have to step outside into below freezing temperatures again to get your newspaper!

Posted on June 21, 2006 11:17 PM
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A recent study from the Nielsen Norman Group

June 20, 2006

My thoughts about a recent study from the Nielsen Norman Group over on the Revenews blog.

The report focuses minimally on RSS with just one chapter, the press release chooses to throw down the gauntlet in the headline: “RSS Feeds Are No Marketing Substitute for E-Mail Newsletters, Reports Nielsen Norman Group.”

In a report that purports to be about guidance for E-Mail newsletter design, why use the press to attack a new medium that the report itself claims is basically unknown among study participants? I’ll tell you why. Because RSS is a very serious threat to email marketing. Read on...

Posted on June 20, 2006 12:08 AM
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Pheed Read #3 - RSS Feeds Provide Untapped Advertising Audience

May 16, 2006

It's been a few months since our last Pheedo Pheed Read report! For those of you who've been watching, the RSS marketplace has grown and matured in just a few short months.

As usual, there's lots of data to share in this Pheed Read. We'll cover a few highlights here, but if you're interested in the full details, please download the Pheed Read Spring 2006 Report here.

Executive Summary

As the RSS publishing and advertising marketplace evolves, it is important to monitor the indicators such as click-through rates, which are normalizing; RSS ad performance, which remains strong; and most importantly, how RSS consumers are interacting with feed content.

Advertisers and publishers need to engage the RSS consumer at the aggregator or feed reader level. That's where the relationship is -- not at the website. Hoping for a click-through by publishing summary feed content is not a viable content monetization strategy in an RSS-enabled publishing model. This is good news for publishers who are evaluating opportunities for RSS feed advertising, and good news for advertisers seeking to reach information consumers in this growing channel.

Full-Text Feeds and Summary Feeds Garner Similar Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Summary feeds (full content not shown in the feed item) average at 12% CTR while full-text feeds average 10% CTR. The report states that the median CTR for full-text feeds remains at 10% while summary feeds drop to 8% CTR due to extremely high CTR rates in certain categories and individual feeds.

Consumers Remaining Within Aggregator / News Reader Environment To View RSS Content
90% of RSS consumers opt to read the feed content entirely in the aggregator environment, regardless whether they are viewing full or partial feeds. This presents a tremendous opportunity to monetize the feed content at the feed reader or aggregator point of consumption.

Standalone Ads Continue to Outperform Inline Ads

Holding true to the December 2005 "Pheed Read," standalone RSS ads continue to outperform inline ads. Standalone ads average a 2.76% CTR while inline ads average .45%.

We took another look at the click-through rate of various modes of RSS ad placement. We noticed some significant fluctuation from the last report, as evidenced in the chart below.

The "Pheed Read" is released quarterly by Pheedo and details trends in RSS usage. In addition to the �Pheed Read,� Pheedo provides analytics capabilities that allow publishers to view detailed feed usage information about their feeds.

For a complete PDF copy of the Pheedo Pheed Read, click here to download.

Check out the press release here.

Posted on May 16, 2006 3:23 PM
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Ad Sales Executive Wanted

April 24, 2006

Join the largest RSS Ad Network selling the hottest online ad space.

Pheedo, Inc. seeks an experienced self-starting online advertising sales executive to join its team in Emeryville, CA where you’ll work with one of the fastest growing online ad mediums. Person's objective is to develop relationships with ad agencies and media buyers.

- 3-5 years’ online ads sales experience a must.
- Established agencies & direct client relationships required.
- Desire to work in a startup environment is crucial.

Complete Details

Send your resume & reference to Bill Flitter (bill AT Pheedo.com).

Posted on April 24, 2006 11:07 AM
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Can New Media Save Print?

March 30, 2006

As I caught my breath and tried to slow my heart rate during a commercial break of the LSU vs. Texas basketball game this weekend, I saw a Cingular ad that caught my attention. The short synopsis is that one guy was reading news headlines out of the newspaper while the other character corrected him with the more up-to-date news he was getting in real-time off of his cell phone.

Yet another industry trying to bring newspapers to their knees. Add “mobile” to the list with online classifieds, advertising, podcasting, etc…

On the flip side, the Newspaper Association of America has launched a $50 million dollar ad campaign to show, based on independent research, that consumers do respond to newspaper advertising and that it is an effective advertising medium.

They have some compelling stats:
• 52% of consumers say newspapers are where they go to check out the ads, five times more than any other medium.
• 46% say newspapers are their preferred medium to receive ad information. TV comes in second at 10%.
• 51% of consumers say newspapers are the most valuable in planning shopping, with the Internet coming in at 11%
• Newspapers lead all media in heavy usage among ‘influential’ and opinion leading consumers at 41% (helping advertisers harness the power of these word-of-mouth advocates.)
Sources: How America Shops and Spends, MORI 2005; Media Engagement Study, Millward Brown 2005 and MRI.

But the fact that this much money is being put into an ad campaign by the NAA proves what we said in an earlier post: the newspaper industry is bleeding. While trying to bring advertisers back to newspapers is one approach to regaining ad momentum in newspapers, I think a much more effective method is for the newspaper industry to embrace and strategize around new media.

RSS grew over 50% last year and is growing even faster this year. The revenue from RSS marketing efforts has grown at the same clip. While many newspapers are offering RSS feeds, very little focus has been put on monetizing them, and this is where publishers are falling short. As ad dollars are draining away from newspapers, the mediums that are taking over the content are being ignored from an advertising perspective.

To the newspaper industry, I say: RSS is here, embrace it as well as other new media alternatives like Mobile.

Posted on March 30, 2006 4:02 PM
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How to Buy RSS Advertising - Part III: Targeting Techniques

February 12, 2006

In the last few years, there has been much emphasis (and dollars) on keyword targeting. Keyword targeting proved to be highly affective for search engines because keywords/phrases are entered into a search box to find something. It’s easy to match keywords with relevant ads. One might think applying keyword targeting to RSS advertising is a slam dunk given the contextual nature of RSS, but that’s not necessarily true.

Continue the story on the Revenews blog.

Posted on February 12, 2006 6:02 PM
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AOL and Yahoo! Put a Nail in the Email Marketing Coffin

February 6, 2006

More good news for RSS, as if being named smartest technology of the year wasn’t enough. The AOL and Yahoo partnership with Goodmail means marketers are looking for better ways to reach consumers as email is being taken down a notch in the marketing food chain.

Read more on my latest post on ReveNews.

Posted on February 6, 2006 9:46 PM
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PR is not dead, it is evolving

February 1, 2006

How is the face of PR changing? Steve Rubel or Shel Holtz may hold the answer. Some say PR is dead.I think PR is evolving.

PRWeb is one company that doesn't get enough credit for how they are changing the face of PR. They explain their service this way:

'FairCommerce is a system that puts services at your disposal while allowing you to decide the value to be placed on those services. For this reason we do not have established delivery prices at PR Web. Our system has been built on the voluntary contributions of our users. We ask our users to take into consideration what similar services cost and contribute accordingly. It's fair.'

We see advertising evolving as well, especially in RSS. Content in RSS is King. So why can't ad content be the driver that gets people to visit your site? The call-to-action doesn't have to happen in the RSS feed but on the landing page. What happens if you combine PRWeb's business model with our belief that ad content is King within RSS?

Today we announced a brand new ad unit developed by Pheedo with PRWeb that displays current press release headlines and abstracts that are contextually relevant to the feed they are placed in. This is just the beginning. The new ads can be seen in feeds spanning all categories of the Pheedo ad network. Content-based advertising is by far the most effective format for RSS ads, and we think this is a very innovative new development and are pretty proud of the work that went into making it happen. We are excited to explore this new territory with our friends Dave and Mic at PRWeb.

Posted on February 1, 2006 8:21 AM
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Blogs Cut Into Mindjet's Search Spending

January 7, 2006

DMNews gives our client, Mindjet, some love. We worked with Mindjet to produce an integrated campaign the included ads in RSS, Blogs, Podcast and a podcast demo.

"Because of the test's success, however, blogging not only heightened the company's brand but also spurred a shift in its overall Internet advertising strategy. While in recent years mainstream search engines have made up nearly all of Mindjet's Web marketing, blogs will entail 25 percent of its online advertising this year."

Read the full article at DMNews, "Blogs Cut Into Mindjet's Search Spending."

Posted on January 7, 2006 3:16 PM
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The RSS Year in Review

I posted the RSS Year in Review over at the Revenews blog. Have a peek.

Posted on January 7, 2006 3:02 PM
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Pheed Read #2 - Standalone RSS Ads Perform, Ad-to-Post Ratios Clarified

December 14, 2005

A few months ago, Pheedo released our first Pheed Read report on the state of RSS advertising, exposing some of the aggregate data we'd been collecting from within our RSS and weblog advertising network. As promised, we're going to continue to do these Pheed Read reports on at least a quarterly basis

A few things have changed since the last Pheed Read, but in many instances the data recorded this time around significantly reinforces what we've been saying all along about how effective RSS and weblog advertising can be.

So, let's get to the findings!

Our first bit of insight is Standalone RSS ads vs. Inline RSS ads. We've had some question on what these ads look like in the context of a feed, so have a look at the images below if you're looking for a graphical representation on what a Standalone ad looks like vs. an Inline, or 'embedded ad', please see these two examples.

Inline Ad Placement

Standalone Ad Placement

Standalone RSS ads are far more successful than inline ads.
A standalone RSS ad (the entire post is the advertisement) generates, on average, a 7.99% click-through rate - over nine times more clicks than an inline RSS ad (an advertisement within a publisher's post).

We often get questions about the 'optimal' ad insertion or ad display frequency. Optimal meaning, "what will get me the greatest click-through?" Over the past quarter, we've payed special attention to this metric and our findings may surprise you.

Placing RSS ads in every other post yields the highest percentage of click throughs.
When ads are placed in every other feed post, users clicked on the ad 3.24% of the time. This is over three times more effective than placing an advertisement in every post in a feed, where the CTR is 1.04%. While this is impressive, it's also important to note that placing one ad to every six posts is also a highly effective ratio.

There are a number of other salient points in the Pheed Read report that marketers and content publishers should take note of.

RSS content CTR varies significantly based on day of the week.
Contrary to earlier "Pheed Read" data which showed peak CTR on Tuesday, Monday and Saturday have emerged as the days with the highest CTR while Thursday and Friday show the lowest percentage.

Mid-week readership of RSS feeds highest.
Consistent with the previous "Pheed Read" report, RSS readership rises steadily at the beginning of the week, peaking on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then declines through the weekend. Average weekend readership is over 67% lower than average weekday readership.

RSS ads are outperforming similar Web ads.
With traditional and rich-media online ads garnering CTR ranging from .20% to 1.17% CTR, according to a report by DoubleClick, standalone RSS ads, with an average CTR of 7.99%, are outperforming traditional online ads by a wide margin.

Bloglines leads RSS readers in market share. **Newsgator family of readers close second**
Bloglines is the most used RSS reader among Pheedo publisher subscribers, consistent with previous "Pheed Read" data. With 34% penetration, Bloglines overshadows Yahoo, NetNewsWire and Mozilla - each with about 14% reader penetration. When you combine the NewsGator family of readers - NewsGator, NG online, FeedDemon, NG EnterpriseServer and NetNewsWire, they come in at right around 20%.

Posted on December 14, 2005 9:27 AM
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How to Buy RSS Advertising - Part II: The Media Plan

October 16, 2005

This is the second in a three part series covering "How to Buy RSS Advertising." In part I, we set the stage and explained the basics of RSS and RSS advertising. Part II, includes putting together a smart RSS advertising media plan, including creative development.

What's Old is New Again
Back in 1998, I bought my first newsletter ad on an alumni newsletter. The goal was to drive leads for a consumer company. The newsletter was so effective; I switched 90% of my ad budget to newsletter advertising and away from banner ads. At that time, the state of the art was text because that was the lowest common denominator for all email clients. The creative consisted of 6 lines of text at 60 characters per line. Plain text was extremely effective.

Now enter RSS. I often compare where we're at with RSS advertising to Internet advertising in 1996 when the state-of-the art was text. Text still works today. Why? With both newsletters and RSS, they are vehicles which convey short concise bites of information. They are summaries of website content. Shorter, clean text ads fit the environment of newsletters in 1996 and RSS in 2005.

The RSS Consumer
Current research points to the RSS consumer is a very desirable to create a connection with. They are the early adaptors that spend more time online, consume more information, have a higher income and are between 18-34 years old.

According to Yahoo!, the RSS consumer looks like this:

• 71% male (47% non-user)


• 50% are 18-34 (36% non-user)


• 36% college graduate (27% non-user)


• 31% have some post-graduate degree (22% non-user)


• $74,116 average household income ($63,095 average user)

By the very nature of RSS, the RSS consumer has made a conscience decision to receive communications from a publisher on a specific topic of interest making that consumer very loyal. In addition to the desirable demographics of the RSS consumer, characteristics that make RSS attractive include:

• Clean, crystal clear channel


• 100% opt-in


• Micro-level targeted


• Persistent, always-on communication


• No Spam or bounced email issues

Getting Started
Most RSS advertising today is targeted by content categories (Technology, Business, Sports, etc) including sub-categories (Mac vs. PC, Small business, small business finance, Basketball, Football.) In some case, especially when the RSS feed is associated with a blog; the content can be micro-targeted (Green Bay Packer football). Keyword level targeting is not that widespread but coming soon.

When it comes to RSS ad creative, keep in mind that this is not search advertising. Keep your search ad Haikus on the search engines. The RSS consumer wants information. Your message should take the tone of telling vs. a selling tone. This means, tell me information about your product. "Click here, buy now" does not win over the RSS consumer... Remember how people are using this medium. They are scanning for information that is relevant to them, saving and reading it later. No one is going to be upset that they didn't receive ads. The goal is to get the consumer to save your ad content and respond.

The actual length of creative is still in flux. The biggest variable in the length of creative is the length of the content summaries (assuming the publisher is sending partial content in the feed). When targeting specific RSS feeds, look at the length of items in the feed. As a rule of thumb, you don't want your ads to be longer than the average content summary.

And don't be too surprised if a publisher returns your ad copy with edits. Remember, RSS is a consumer controlled medium. Publishers are aware that their readers have a one-click unsubscribe option right at their fingertips. This means, publishers are more conscious than ever of what ad content goes into their feed.

Limitations of RSS
I will be the first to tell you, RSS is not perfect. It has limitations. This is a new medium in its infancy.

Limited formatting options: The state of the art for ads in RSS feeds is text with a supporting image (jpg/GIF). RSS currently doesn't support flash or pop-ups. And in some cases your image will not be served due to offline reading or simply because the news aggregator doesn't support images.

Only 6% of the internet population is using RSS: Only 6% of the Internet population is using RSS. If you run a successful test with RSS and are ready to move beyond the experimentation phase, keep in mind you may be limited by the total audience size. Nevertheless, RSS usage is growing rapidly. Test now and be prepared for its rapid growth.

Limited targeting capabilities: RSS is a great one to many tool. A few companies are dabbling in one-to-one feeds but those solutions are not perfect either. Again, RSS is in its infancy. Look for more targeting capabilities as we move along.

Various displays of the content: With over 42 popular news aggregators in use (compared to 3 popular web browsers), there is no consistent user interface and not standards for how RSS content should be displayed for the reader. Some news aggregators display only headlines, while others display headlines and short summaries. Furthermore, news aggregators can have a two or three pane user interface, separate website versions, client downloads, or plugins to Microsoft Outlook or your browser.

RSS will mature. A few news aggregators will dominate the market. We'll be able to do more sophisticated targeting and add more robust creative. It's just a matter of time.

My best advice is to be patient when using it as an advertising vehicle. Test now to gain early understanding so you are a step ahead of your competition when RSS usage and RSS advertising explodes. RSS, or content syndication is here to stay.

Posted on October 16, 2005 3:05 PM
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Add RSS to Your Marketing Mix

August 11, 2005

Rok from Marketing Studies ask whether or not marketers need RSS?

Heidi Cohen from Clickz explains why RSS should be in your marketing mix.

After reading these two articles, it got me thinking. Will RSS become the generic term for all syndicated content? The ATOM format is now under the control of the Internet Engineering Task Force. What will we become of RSS and Atom? Talking with publishers, they don't care. They care about what "it" can do. If ATOM gives them more "features", they will work with that format.

Posted on August 11, 2005 9:22 AM
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How to Buy RSS Advertising - Part I.Setting the Stage

August 9, 2005

Today on Revenews, I posted part one of a three part series on how to buy RSS advertising.

Setting the Stage
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 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. ...

Posted on August 9, 2005 10:26 PM
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Google RSS Ad Patent Protection Explained

August 1, 2005

As most folks already are aware, Google has filed a patent application attempting to cover their insertion of ads in syndicated content.

At Pheedo, we’ve been fielding a lot of questions about what this means for both Pheedo and RSS advertising as a whole. First off, the fact that Google is taking measures to protect itself in RSS advertising is a point of validation for our growing industry. Even though Google's been very aggressive in the past with patent filings, it's validation nonetheless. This filing by Google wasn’t much of a surprise coming from a company of its size and resources, and actions like these are also to be expected in a fast-growing industry.

Second, it’s important to understand that Google is very early in the process, and it’s too speculative to say what protection, if any, might be granted. The biggest concern raised by this development is whether Google will somehow own or have a monopoly on RSS advertising. The answer to that question is a resounding “No”. Simply put, for both legal and practical reasons, Google is not going to ‘own’ RSS advertising. At best, Google may gain some protection for its specific techniques and methods of inserting and tracking ads in syndicated content.

This will have little impact on Pheedo - or RSS advertising as a whole – since the development of RSS advertising was well underway prior to Google filing its patent application. Thus, despite some concerns that Google may gain a monopoly on RSS advertising, this is simply not the case.

The other question is, "Are we going to file a patent application in response?" The answer is, “No we will not file a patent application in response. We'll file patent applications when it makes sense for us strategically.” When you file, you make your trade secrets public and the timing for doing so is important. But we will keep working hard to know our audience and create targeted RSS advertisements that work.

Posted on August 1, 2005 2:18 PM
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"Pheed Read" No. 1 - RSS Usage Revealed.

July 21, 2005

Pheedo decided to take a peek under the hood at some of the RSS advertiser and publisher data that we’ve been collecting. While not much has been published yet on RSS advertising statistics, we’d like to share a few insights for our publishers that we’re seeing from our reporting tools. Going forward, we’ll be more formally packaging our data and insight into a series of what we’re calling “Pheed Read” reports. Our initial insights follow.

Tuesday is the most active day in RSS; Saturday least active.

- Our initial observations of the data point to Tuesday being the most active day for viewership, feed retrieval and click-throughs.

- Click through rate (CTR) differs by over 70 percent from Tuesday, the most active day for RSS, to Saturday, the least active. Feed retrieval (when a user’s feed reader fetches the RSS feed) is a bit more consistent with a 47 percent swing between the two days.

- The second best day for all of the aforementioned metrics is Wednesday, showing an average 22 percent differential from Tuesday.

The “morning scanners” view most content; late night readers click through more.

- CTR fluctuates from 7 to 11 percent depending on the hour of the day that users are consuming the content. It is interesting to note that CTR peaks in the late night daypart hours and late in the afternoon during the daytime daypart hours.

- The initial CTR reports surprised us. Considering that CTR on PPC marketing is around 7 percent for a first rank item, with email and banner advertising trailing that number, a high CTR for RSS caught us off guard. Look for a deep dive into the CTR of RSS feeds and ads in a future report. Further, CTR is made up of two factors: impressions and click-throughs. Impression calculation does not take into account off-line viewing of feeds, which could potentially skew impression data.

- Viewership of RSS feeds follows a different trend. There is a significant spike in RSS readership during the early morning daypart, which tails off as the day goes on. We attribute this to the ‘scanning’ behavior of RSS consumers, whereby they read the volume of the content published overnight and in the morning immediately upon arriving to work or logging on each day. There is another spike in the late night. According the Online Publishers Association (OPA,) the typical reader during this late night daypart is the tech-savvy 18 to 24 year old reading from home.

Led by Bloglines, 70 percent of Pheedo managed feeds are read by only five aggregators.

- Consistent with other RSS aggregator market share reports on the Internet, Pheedo is seeing Bloglines atop our feed reader statistics, followed by Firefox, Thunderbird, NewsGator and Sharpreader. In aggregate, these readers are used by almost 70 percent of people subscribing to Pheedo managed RSS content.

RSS is growing up; Reader data illustrates shift from early adopters to mainstream.

- One interesting point to note is that the NetNewsWire aggregator for the Mac is no where in our top 5 aggregators, whereas it was number two in FeedBurner’s statistics. We attribute this to two factors. First, RSS is growing up. Charles Smith pointed out earlier this year that as RSS adoption moves mainstream, which is comprised mainly of Windows computers, we’ll see NetNewsWire’s share migrate to the space that is typically occupied by the Safari browser in most web analytics reports, about 1 to 2 percent. Secondly, the sample that we derived these stats from was skewed toward the technology category, which caters in large part to the Wintel market segment.

Posted on July 21, 2005 10:21 AM
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Attention Marketers, avoid jail time, use RSS

June 30, 2005

Attention Marketers, avoid jail time, use RSS - I say that jokingly or do I? If I were an email marketer today, I would seriously consider other alternatives like RSS ads. Email is getting destimated by laws, expense and jail time risk. Clickz reports on a story today:

New E-mail Laws May Catch Marketers Off-Guard
E-mail marketers may be surprised to discover they need to comply with new laws taking effect in Michigan and Utah on Friday.
The "Child Protection Registry" laws, meant to shield youngsters from adult material, affect anyone sending commercial e-mail to inboxes in
those states.... E-mail senders are required to match their mailing lists against the registries on a monthly basis, for which they must pay
both Michigan and Utah a per-e-mail-address fee. The Michigan law limits the fee to $0.03 per address, while the Utah law leaves it to the
discretion of the state's Department of Consumer Protection to set the fees.

These costs are going to be passed along to you, the marketer. Not mention, if by accident an email is received by a minor in those stats, you could face jail time! Is it worth it? These laws are in place to stop the "bad guys." So you punish the good guys to get the bad guys? The bad guys will just find ways around the law.

Not to mention, the law states, "Individuals may place on the registries any e-mail address to which a minor may have access." Guess what I would do if lived in Michigan or Utah? My son has "access" to my laptop (and my email) when I work from home. I would register my personal and work related email addresses in that case.

Unbelievable what has transpired over the years in email. It is getting riskier to send email, period. It now requires a professional firm that focuses on compliance just to send an email. Good for them, bad for the marketer and ultimately the consumer.

Pull don't push. Get thinking about an RSS advertising strategy before you find yourself sharing a small room with an armed robber.

Posted on June 30, 2005 10:53 AM
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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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Best Practices for RSS Advertising

May 17, 2005

Over the last 18 months we've been working diligently to help our publishers monetize their feed content. We have proven to advertisers that RSS advertising works.

Something to keep in mind is RSS is a much different medium than its interactive brethren such as email, the Web or search; the tactics used there won’t always work for RSS. We've put together a set of best practices for making RSS advertising an indispensable part of your marketing strategy. These best practices are based upon data gathered from our advertisers over several months of running ads in feeds.

These Best Practices boil down to a few simple rules, which are:

1. Ads must fit the environment
2. Ads must be relevant and informative
3. Watch the content to ad ratio and unsubscribe rates
4. Tell, don’t sell: RSS ads are about creating relationships with readers
5. Be patient: Unlike e-mail, RSS feeds don't demand to be read.

Ads must fit the environment
Why are people consuming RSS? To escape ads, get away from the SPAM filling their inboxes, save time, and keep track of conversations across blogs among other things. RSS is a brand new advertising environment, and that means the ads that work in other interactive environments may not have the same results in RSS.

For example, if ad units are all image-based, some news aggregators can’t or won’t display them. The ads need to be formatted to match the specification of the news aggregator requesting the ad. With RSS, a combination of text and images is the best recipe for maximizing exposure.

Since news aggregators display ads differently, an important aspect to consider is stand-alone vs. embedded ads. Some aggregators just show headlines. If you embed an ad in a headline-only reader, your ad will not be seen. To maximize exposure, advertisers need to understand how the major aggregators display content; the easiest way is to work with a provider who formats your ad automatically to fit the aggregator requesting the ad.

RSS is 100% opt-in. Consumers have asked to receive this information, and ad performance can be high if done correctly because consumers are often dedicated readers of their feeds. Because consumers have explicitly chosen to view a feed, RSS is targeted, can be highly relevant and often reaches forward-thinking individuals that have actually opted-in to hear from a specific publisher.

Ads should be relevant and informative
Given the quick subscribe/unsubscribe nature of RSS, advertising needs to be more relevant and less obtrusive at the same time than other forms, or not be seen at all. The scanning mentality of RSS consumption requires new thinking of how to integrate ads into the RSS stream. The same rules apply as they do with all marketing – target your ads and make them relevant. Relevant “ad content” is king in this medium.

Currently, one to one RSS subscriptions have not quite arrived. There are some sophisticated news aggregators scanning every feed that comes into their service and republishing that feed back for the general public to grab – making a unique RSS feed not unique any longer if it is made available to everyone. This will change. RSS is still young and evolving.

Watch the content to ad ratio and unsubscribe rates
Consumers, simply put, control RSS. They will not put up with irrelevant ad content. There are too many other sources of information. The most powerful tool in RSS is the “unsubscribe” button in all news aggregators. Consumers will vote with their mouse. If publishers let too many irrelevant ads in their feeds, then consumers will quickly turn elsewhere.

Advertising ratios and practices will likely vary from publisher to publisher; but an ad on every post is not a good practice. Consumers will just start to ignore it or, even worse, unsubscribe. The best measure for publishers is to look at the unsubscribe rates and to play with the number of ads to content.

The nature of RSS and its one-click unsubscribe functionality makes this new marketing medium self-policing with a limited need for filters or government intervention. RSS advertising can be very simple and straightforward as long as you respect the medium and the power and interests of consumers

Tell, don’t sell: RSS ads are about creating relationships with readers
RSS is a relationship medium. It’s about telling a story and providing information, not just selling. Consumers keep turning to RSS in greater numbers for one overwhelming reason: to get information in a easy way. RSS provides quick summaries and highlights in a very organized manner.

Be patient: Unlike e-mail, RSS feeds don't demand to be read.
There’s still a lot to figure out with RSS, and savvy advertisers need to practice patience with this new, exciting medium. But, the market is quickly growing, so it’s time to start getting your feet wet and trying out campaigns. The latest numbers from Pew Internet show 6 million RSS subscribers, and some publishers are experiencing 20 to 40 percent subscriber growth each month.

Early ads are working well for many advertisers, but RO Is not overnight. RSS is a unique medium. Instant Messaging requires instant responses. Email is about a call to action. Web ads are all about click-throughs. But RSS is different. The information will be there when the consumers is ready; and it’s an information medium first-and-foremost, not a critical communication channel like email or IM. So, advertisers need to be patient. Build the trust of readers. Understand why they love RSS. Speak their language.