The battle around web site advertising now rages around what a site’s true hit statistics are. Advertisers are seeking accountability by relying on ratings panels from Neilsen/NetRatings, but site owners are seeing major flaws in the ratings panels system. Check out this article How Many Site Hits? Depends on Who’s Counting in the New York Times to get a good view from both sides of the debate.

I say let them battle it out, because the real advertising value, measurement and trackability is in RSS feeds. The recent article RSS Ad Response Tops E-Mail in InternetNews.com shows how RSS advertising is more targeted and more effective than e-mail advertising, and e-mail blows away banner advertising based on impressions.

It makes sense since RSS is a consumer controlled subscription-based information channel. The future of RSS advertising is tremendous. Through our own Castlock RSS platform we are successfully testing advertising scenarios that offer highly targeted text and image advertising based on RSS feed content. So we are not just sending out the same advertisement through the feed, but have a cadre of ads ready to be distributed based on the content of the feed. So imagine if CNN could tell Toyota, that they run its ads only in content tagged with a specific set of keywords. Now you’re talking targeted advertising.

So go ahead and battle it out over page views, and leave RSS to the professionals who know the value of targeted, highly converting RSS advertising. We’ll see you all at the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

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