If you read the post on branded RSS aggregators you already know the many business benefits of providing your own aggregator to your visitors.

One of the recent players to enter this market, Custom Reader, just launched the beta version of their branded desktop aggregator, and gave me a shot at doing my own branded edition.

From the end-user's point of view, Custom Reader is a lean client with key RSS "reading" features and an intuitive user interface that quickly grows on you.

From the brand's point of view, Custom Reader presents some unique features that help enforce the brand, facilitate customer relationships and facilitate sales:

a] The brand/publisher can add their own RSS feeds, which the user cannot unsubscribe from, and place them in prominent positions within the reader. These feeds can include anything from company blog updates, corporate news, product updates, customer service updates, podcasts to product announcements. The unique feature is that the publisher can actually change these as he likes, and the changes are then implemented across all installed versions of his reader.

b] Sales facilitation, product placement or other advertisements are possible through the "Notice" feature, giving the publisher the opportunity to "burn" an unobtrusive visual/text ad for his products or other things he would like to promote.

c] The reader can be further branded with the publisher's logo, URL and e-mail address. Future Custom Reader releases are expected to introduce branded reader skins as well.

d] The most unique feature of the reader is the "Feed Rank", which allows the publisher to keep track of the feeds his users are subscribing to, unsubscribing from and importing, and the views and clickthroughs for his own pre-set feeds and notices; all of this on the aggregate level without any personally identifiable information. The tracking is completely transparent for the end-users, who can easily enable or disable it.

To get a better impression of the reader, download and install the MarketingStudies.net branded version, which currently has two pre-set feeds (MarketingStudies.net RSS Diary and Lockergnome RSS & Atom Tips) and an unobtrusive advertisement.

Much recommended to all internet publishers who are putting some faith in RSS.