Is Amazon missing the RSS opportunity?

Yes, in almost all regards. A company of their size, financing and almost unlimited content could be the poster child for smart RSS marketing uses, but insteady they choose to almost ignore the channel.

But today I would like to touch-up especially on the RSS advertising segment, where many marketers still seem to ignore the various opportunities offered by the channel.

Even more specifically, this is about RSS advertising in RSS feeds for blogs.

What Are the Key Advertising Issues Faced by Bloggers?

• Bloggers like to keep their act clean, and in many cases that means either completely evading paid advertising or at least completely evading non-contextual paid advertising.
• Even when bloggers do decide to offer advertising, they are hard-pressed to find advertisers offering high-context advertising that would closely relate to the bloggers' content, especially their individual blog posts.
• There are still few RSS advertisers, making it difficult for many bloggers to monetize on their every post.
• However, if bloggers were to monetize their every post, the ads would need to be so highly contextual that they would not feel that they are betrying their readers.
• In essence, the ads would need to be an extension of their content, but at the same time clearly marked as third-party content.
• Following this line of though further, bloggers would prefer ads that provide real contextual value to their readers, instead of simply pushing blatant advertising messages.

Where's the Opportunity for Amazon?

Before I explore this further, please take a look at any post at MasterNewMedia. Or just click here and take a look at this one.

Robin Good is a master at taking advantage of the functionality offered by the Amazon affiliate program. Each of his posts concludes with recommended books, related to the overall topic of his in-depth articles.

For Robin's readers, these book ads are not just ads, but rather extensions of Robin's own content, giving them the opportunity to further explore the topic.

What's the opportunity for Amazon?

Create and promote a program that would make it easy for bloggers to publish contextually related book ads directly in their RSS feeds, enabling them to at least somewhat monetize each of their content items with relevant book ads.

Providing Valuable Context Advertising

But, to some bloggers providing book ads just as ads might not be contextual enough.

Now go to A9.com and do a search for "RSS marketing". In addition to displaying relevant books, the A9 search engine also displays quotes from these books.

How about if Amazon enabled bloggers to post RSS ads in their feeds, displaying a paragraph from each book that most closely matches the topic of the article, with a direct link to the page for that book on Amazon?

Or in the case of blogs about music, why not provide an automatic direct link in the ad to a 1 minute or 30 second demo of the song or group, mentioned in the blog post, which Amazon already has on their website?

Picking on Wikipedia

We all love Wikipedia, right?

Many of Wikipedia users love them so much that they constantly promote the website. So why can't the people at Wikipedia make this easier for bloggers?

For example by allowing them to automatically insert references to Wikipedia in the form of inline RSS ads, providing additional contextual content, related with the topic of the blog post?

No revenues for the blogger, but at least a good way for them to extent their content and provide more value to their readers.

Perhaps not a good RSS advertising example, but certainly one that can get you thinking about the various opportunities provided by this channel.