This is a summary of a presentation by Brent Hill of Feedburner, which has recently been acquired by Google. His role is Vice President of Advertising Services so obviously is highly hopeful that advertising in RSS feeds is the next big thing, however, this is an interesting case for why RSS should definitely be considered as an option.

RSS isn’t mainstream but definitely on the rise

RSS has moved well beyond the blog, which originally one of the few places that you would routinely see an RSS feed. Now a wide variety of companies are publishing RSS feeds: blogs, publishers, and corporate feeds. It is perhaps a little surprising how quickly all the major content sites caught onto RSS and then implemented it so quickly.

It’s a great time to a subscriber, no matter how you get your feeds. There are so many freely available web based RSS readers such as Google Reader and others, but now you can easily get RSS content into personalised home pages like Google and PageFlakes. As if that wasn’t enough, Internet Explorer 7 now has a built in RSS reader, making it even simpler. Basically RSS is not just for early adopters and geeks.

Why advertise in feeds?

• Quality of content you can get via RSS is now greatly improved
• Quantity of feeds are huge. Take advantage of the long tail effect and get your message across a wide range of sites and audiences
• Reach an audience that might not actually visit the site anymore so aren’t going to see advertising on the site (e.g. TechCrunch has 413,000 subscribers who probably don’t visit the site very often)
• Targeting is possible (Demographic data is available)
• Measurable and effectiveness is on a par with other online advertising mediums
• Industry-standard ad serving (3rd party, geo target etc). AdClimate - stops ads appearing with inappropriate content.

What can you do?

Display (banners) and text available, however display ads must be smaller sizes to fit with content. A blog post might only be a paragraph so you can’t sit a huge skyscraper banner next to it.

RSS applications are varied (over 3000) so display ads must be tested to work in different formats.

Feed-powered ads. Content for the ads come from a feed itself.

Periodic creative changes help sustain CTR (Click Through Rate) because RSS subscribers are generally checking feeds daily so you don’t want to keep giving them the same ad.

The next big thing in RSS marketing is going to be businesses launching feeds with special offers. So where better to advertise your feed and get people to subscriber to it than IN feeds e.g. retailer launching a feed with special offers advertises in RSS feeds where the audience is likely to be able to subscribe to the retailer’s feed with a single click.

This all makes sense to me, RSS advertising should be part of the online media mix.