Establishing RSS Advertising Standards

While RSS benchmarks and metrics standards for publishers might still be far, a group of companies has started to lay down the ground-work for RSS advertising standards.

Most certainly a noteworthy and neccessary move if RSS is to be established as a relevant advertising medium. Pure and simple, advertisers need standardized metrics and standardized ad sizes. Without these basic foundations, RSS advertising cannot even begin to grow.

Pheedo, Feedburner and Syndicate IQ are the companies we need to congratulate on this move.

Bill Flitter of Pheedo comments (on his blog):

"To initiate the effort for RSS Advertising Standards, Pheedo has been working closely with Feedburner and Syndicate IQ.

Some of the items that we've been discussing include:
1. Defining RSS metrics (clicks, impressions, views)
2. RSS ad sizes
3. IAB participation

We will be soliciting comments from publishers, advertisers and consumers as well as expanding the committee to include other interested parties. At the end of this, our goal is to make suggestions to the IAB. We welcome the IAB's support as well as yours. What we are NOT doing is forming a long-term standards group. This is just a steering committee that will make recommendations, period. Once the IAB sees a need to include RSS Advertising in their list of standards, we will gladly let them do what they do best. We are not by any means trying to own the process, but only to move it along in the right direction."

The group does have a huge challenge infront of them, first having to work out a feasible solution amongs themselves, and then getting support from IAB.

While I understand that they want IAB to "enforce" the standards, I question whether IAB can move fast enough for the new world of internet marketing. Previous experience from how long it took them to create a batch of standards for rich media ads certainly makes this argument valid.

We'll just have to wait and see ...