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All About RSS Advertising
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Another Guest Post by Raghav Soni – A Regular Contributor
Online content consumption habits are undergoing a radical transformation. Internet users are increasingly consuming their content on personal start pages, RSS readers, and widgets and are ensuring that websites do not get visited directly. This syndicated content revolution is being fueled by the widespread availability of RSS feeds.
RSS wasn’t seriously considered a major consumer distribution and contact channel by the online advertising community until 2003.
Consumers today crave control over their media and are flocking to technologies that provide that control.
RSS is a content delivery channel, and as marketers have the tendency to use every content channel for marketing, they are now targeting RSS as the new medium of advertising
RSS- the new medium of advertising:-
Advertising embedded in RSS feeds is becoming a hot topic. Last fall, Wired magazine ran a story about the growth of RSS advertising.
This channel got a shot in the arm after the announcement from Google a long time ago that they are testing RSS advertisements (is Google Testing Chat Ads?)
The others likes include Overture, Kanoodle, Google AdSense (who is just beta testing the solution with a selected number of publishers), Pheedo, RSSAds and (soon many more).
Some facts why RSS advertising is gaining popularity:-
DESIRABLE DEMOGRAPHICS: RSS users are affluent, active online, and more influential than the average web user.
CAPTIVE AUDIENCE: 90% of RSS users stay in the RSS reader to consume a publisher’s content. Whereas most of the rss readers today come with built in browser function. (Source: Nielsen NetRatings)
100% OPT-IN AUDIENCE: Users of RSS have requested specific content. They are four times more likely to subscribe to feeds outside the top 20 web properties. (Source: Nielsen NetRatings)
WORD-OF-MOUTH MARKETING EFFECT: RSS users are 15% more likely to recommend a product or service vs. a non RSS user. (Source: Nielsen NetRatings)
Increased usage:-A recent study by Slashdot.org study reveals 73 percent of existing RSS users intend to increase their RSS consumption this year. Rss users visit three times as many news site than non rss users.
Higher cpm:- RSS advertising is priced on a CPM basis, and rates range from $5 CPM to $20 CPM, depending on targeting criteria. (Harshil Adds: Ragahv, not sure if that’s a good thing for advertisers)
Higher ctr:- CTR(click through rate) lift of 100% over their onsite banner placements. (Harshil Adds: Click through rates for Banner ads are PATHETIC. They have fallen from 0.5% to 0.05 - 0.10%; which is also probably why ad networks are constantly looking at other avenues for placing ads. They will flock where the audience flocks)
Advantages to various sections:-
a] The Marketer Perspective:-
No marketer can overlook the marketing perspective of RSS advertising. It’s targeted, it can be highly relevant and it reaches forward-thinking individuals that have actually opted-in to hear from a specific publisher.
As a marketer may not want to abuse that trust, but build on it and provide subscribers with relevant advertising, which completes and adds to the reading experience, not take away from it.
b] The Publisher Perspective:-
Publishers are not in the content business exclusively to provide a service to the “community”, but in order to generate revenues.
RSS advertising makes this possible, helping publishers generate additional revenues and thus also provide better and more high-quality and high-frequency content.
Let us not forget that creating and providing content costs money and time, and only publishers that make money from this will survive on the long-term.
c] The End-User Perspective:-
First, as an end-user I want to receive high-quality free content (to a certain extent, of course), which is only possible if the publisher makes enough money to cover the editorial and publishing expenses for producing such high quality content, and is of course rewarded for his great work with greater profitability.
And second, again as an end-user, I want to have as much content as possible available via RSS feeds.
How rss advertisements would look:-
Today some companies provide recurring advertisements in rss by burning the feeds again and again thus adding the functionality of google adwords like service.
End note:-
Lets take an e.g of TECHCRUNCH who receives 7.5 million page views a month. They currently charge 12000$/month for advertisements.
Their RSS views have reached 5 million page views and they currently make around 10000$/month
This proves that today RSS is not just another medium but an important tool, which if used correctly could bolster visitors to a site with huge increase in advertisement revenue..
One more thing Techcrunch currently is reporting 775k RSS subscribers which is down 150k in a single day may be because of their excessive RSS ad policies.
As far as excessive advertisements are concerned RSS is a one-click system, which could provide remedy to a user by unsubscribing to an ad cluttered feed publisher.
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harshil there is one correction for the thing (the advertisers flock where the audience flocks)…….dont u think that if ctr’s are falling that’s because people are becoming familiar with methods of advertisements so they do not fall into the trap as people visiting web site’s are not declining…
well not necessarily. Even if CTR’s are falling i think advertisers prefer being in arenas where audiences are spending time and figuring out innovative ways to engage them. That puts the onus on advertisers. Google spent some time without any revenue before they figured out a sustainable search marketing model. Similarly people are spending time figuring out Social Media models as well. The onus is on advertisers to create good enough models where audiences are spending time. If an advertiser moves away from a medium just because CTR’s are low (despite audiences spending time on it) - it would be both foolish and indicate a lazy attitude. Conventionally, people have never ‘liked’ advertising. And that will remain.
Gr8 write up..well covered all aspects.. absolutely true.. i have been lukin for this RSS advertisin from adsense for quite sometime now.. finally they r comin out wit it..:))