inluminent

Found at MarketingWonk: Feeding Ads Through Feeds

A reader of Lockerknome wrote this:

If RSS just becomes another polluted source of noise, it will be no better than email or the Web are right now. If an RSS feed is going to have ads interspersed with content, itís not saving me time. What made RSS feeds unique was that they gave me what I asked for and nothing was wasted. If all companies are publishing to RSS is advertisement-laden crap, we end up with nothing more than a poorly functioning version of the same thing we have now.

Chris Pirillo answers that the beauty of RSS is that it’s a pull medium (I’m paraphrasing here) and in that it’s a pull medium, it’s too easy for us as users to unsubscribe from the feed if we don’t like it, but I think that’s shirking the issue. What if we really, really like the content, but hate the advertising? What if the advertising becomes too overpowering because of a greedy sales manager at the publishing company for the users? Sure, the publisher will loose readers, but how can the publisher balance advertisements and reader’s needs, wants, and desires?

I’ve long advocated advertising in RSS (though I don’t do it here because I’m too lazy to figure it out, and I have nothing to sell) as long as the advertising is targeted and relevant to the audience of the RSS feed. For example, a website about Sci-fi books might offer one ad in a feed of 10 news items that changes once a week for a new book – that would be targeted and relevant.

Another example might be Gawker offering local New York businesses a weekly sponsorship of their RSS feed only to local businesses that offer something to local readers in New York, and to earn the opportunity to sponsor the feed, those businesses must truly offer something of value to New York readers that will drive traffic to their store: A supermarket offering free milk if you buy $10 of crap at their store, or J&R offering a free CF card if you come buy something at their down-town store on a Saturday where they’re having an HP marketing event… something like that is targeted and relevant and offers value to the reader.

The ad should only show up in the RSS feed as ‘new’ once per week or month, depending on the audience that it’s targeted to reach. And yes, I agree, weekly ‘new’ would probably work best for most advertisers.

Adam Kalsey shows how to put a weekly ad in his SimpleLinks RSS feed that’s produced with MovableType with this article.

Amazon does a good job of offering their content through RSS feeds, and I’d argue that this is a complete feed system that’s truly just advertising as content.

And lastly, Ken Schaefer provides his comments on advertisements in RSS feeds in this post on his weblog.