Posted on October 23, 2007
RSS Advertising is Targeted and Measurable
BY JAMES CLARK
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.
That's the thing - as an internet and email marketer, I do understand the power inherent in rss advertising - the only problem is the fact that it has not been adopted widely enough, nor made easy enough for widespread consumption.
A couple of years ago at a bar in Portland, Oregon, I had a life-changing conversation with a developer friend who was trying to explain to me the value of RSS advertising. He was explaining to me in goobledygook about how the content was syndicated, and how ads could be served in, and how RSS was going to be more important than the web or e-mail. That conversation is what convinced me to get into internet marketing as a career. And he was right, RSS is becoming more important than web or e-mail from a marketing standpoint in a lot of different scenarios.
BTW, Castlock looks pretty cool. I think what holds RSS back from widespread adoption is that it is still too difficult and hackish for people to figure out how to consume and publish content.