RSS Advertising Developing Further

ClickZ.com has an interesting article overviewing the marketing development of RSS, and especially focusing on RSS advertising.

While most of the article rehashes what we already know, there is an interesting point the author makes. Being a non-believer in the advertising power of RSS, he changed his mind after reading about Fred Wilson's RSS advertising experiments:

"Wilson has been getting about three times the number of RSS requests for his blog as he gets page views. He's been running contextually targeted Google AdSense ads on his site; he recently implemented a new service from FeedBurner that inserts contextually targeted Overture ads into his RSS feeds and measures feed "views." Incredibly, after only three days of testing, he discovered the effective clicks and revenue yield from Overture ads in RSS views were almost equal to his AdSense page views. In other words, using a new technology to insert and measure ads and audience, he can monetize his existing RSS readers at a rate that should double his total online ad revenue.

Over three days, Wilson's blog had 7,450 page views. For those same days, RSS views on his FeedBurner feed were 7,350. These RSS views account for only 30 percent of his total RSS subscribers because, as with many blogs, his RSS views are three times his Web page views. During those days, he had 36 AdSense click-through from his Web pages. He had 10 Overture clicks from his RSS feeds. If similar ads were inserted in the other 70 percent of his RSS feeds, they would very likely produce total click-through numbers that approximated his Web page yield. Wilson's AdSense ads are optimized for his pages (they've been running for over a year). His Overture ads haven't yet been optimized for his feeds, since this is the first time they ran.

Wilson is now able to generate revenue from his RSS feeds, plus he has real visibility into the audience he's attracting. He can determine how many people actually view his RSS feeds, rather than just how many feeds were sent, which was all he could do before."

My recent interview with Feedster disclosed similar results: the effectiveness of RSS advertising is somewhere between Google AdWords and Google AdSense, which is good news for RSS, especially since RSS advertising is less expensive.

Advertisers are advised to get in early, while they can still get the low prices currently on the market.