If you haven’t spotted any ads in your RSS feeds yet, you aren’t missing anything – they aren’t even effective enough to be annoying. But that will change. As RSS adoption continues to rise, so will its monetization. And the curve will begin to demonstrate that RSS is quite possibly the most effective advertising medium available today. If that sounds overly ambitious, keep reading.
- RSS feeds contain extremely focused content, telling advertisers exactly what subscribers are interested in.
- The subscriber has actively opted in (and can very easily opt out) demonstrating they want to receive the content.
- Delivery is guaranteed – there are no overzealous spam filters blocking outsider correspondence.
- Credibility is guaranteed – the subscriber trusts and respects the source enough to subscribe to the feed.
To recap, an RSS reading audience is targeted, interested, glued, and trusting. You won’t find that combination of strengths anywhere else in the grown-up world.
The sophistication of the RSS advertising efforts I’ve seen to date isn’t quite as impressive. The only ads I’ve seen go like this… “Adv: Get online quick with ___”. Even if I couldn’t or didn’t block that post, I would give it the same attention as an email or letter with the same subject line or envelope branding.
Free advice: proclaiming the advertising status of a message is the same as warning a reader not to read it. Bloggers don’t need to apologize for including an ad or two in their feeds. The world understands the concept of ad supported content. And, if you’re doing your job, the ads being placed should have relative interest to the readers anyway.
It’s an interesting topic for us. On one hand, we develop products to give readers more control over the messages being delivered to them. On the other hand, we provide services to help clients deliver effective marketing messages. (If I had a third hand, I might point out that many of our clients are content publishers. On a fourth hand, I could note that we all blog.)
We apparently picked the wrong Ad:tech to attend – San Francisco seems to be abuzz on the topic. If it wasn’t for our friends at Datran showing us the town, NYC might have been for naught.
Update: I noticed a post by Marshall Kirkpatrick on the topic tonight as well.
2 Responses to “Advertising in RSS”
I disagree with you about designating something as advertising. Look at the example of the ad I wrote about in the post you linked to above. It was an ad for OurMedia.org in a search feed for my name. I spend a second or two looking for my name in the text, were it not for the quick ADV prefix at the opening of the text I might have spent more time looking for my search term and would have gotten frustrated by the experience. As it is, the advert delivered as a unique item in the feed was clearly marked and of sufficient interest that I read it.
No one needs to apologize, but making it evident that it is a different type of animal from the other feed items is just helpful, honest and nice. I’ll still read your ad, heck I’ll click on it if you’re nice to me!
I hear you Marshall, but you’re describing a specific ad type. Newspapers would subhead this as “paid advertising” to help separate advertorial / editorial content, and that makes sense.
My suggestion to get the “adv” label out stems from a basic concern: the world will be able to filter their RSS, and they will. And that, my friend, means no more guaranteed delivery.
Thanks for your comments Marshall – I appreciate your visit.