Tech Goes Boom

RSS and advertising

Dave Winer wrote a little article in response to the question:

Dave, how I can explain to my large media corporation higher-ups why it's not a bad thing that they lose traffic (and therefore revenue) if their readers are using our RSS feeds instead of visiting the site?

Dave responds by saying that RSS doesn't really reduce the amount of traffic to your web site. The theory here is that in RSS you post summaries of your articles with links to the full text on your web site. When your readers hit your site, they then get your advertising. Dave doesn't want to see advertising in feeds.

I recommend that you not put ads in the feed itself. A few pubs have experimented with this, and as a reader I don't like it. I get the value when I read the full article, and there I don't mind an ad, but the aggregator window is mine, I paid for it, I paid for the Internet connection, like seeing ads before a movie (a practice I abhor) it doesn't seem fair for you to put ads in my space.

While the feed reader and the web browser function in different ways, they perform fundamentally the same function. Just because you pay for a feed reader but not a browser doesn't mean anything. Paying for a feed reader is not paying for content. Dave goes on to site ads at the beginning of movies as a comparison. This is obviously fallacious. You are paying to see a movie, not buying the theater. If I pay to watch a movie, I am paying for the content, and to a lesser degree, paying a bit of the theater's rent, and therefor shouldn't be charged for the content again by watching ads. By paying for a feed reader, you are paying for a method of consuming content, not the content itself.

The feed aggregator has pretty much replaced the web browser for much of what I read on the web. Feeds make it very convenient to see only new material, and only relevant material. At the same time, I don't subscribe to summary feeds. My aggregator is not there only to alert me to when there is new content, it's also become a way to consume content in a simple, powerful and consistent way. I don't have to worry about web designers using low contrast 6 point gray text on a white background. I don't have to worry about any design elements interfering with what I essentially want to do, which is read the article. As a content provider, it's not enough that your provide an update notification via RSS, I want the article.

Much of the value of RSS for me is exactly this. It's a better way to consume the web for me. Keeping on top of upwards of 300 content sources via the web is very hard. RSS helps here, but that value is very limited if I'm navigating back and forth between applications to consume that content.

Will advertising kill feeds? If your feed is only summaries, yeah it probably will. But I wouldn't mind seeing text ads in full content feeds any more than I mind seeing them in web pages. But any feed that invites me to punch a monkey will get axed. I can always unsubsribe. Almost all of our readers here at techgoesboom use feed readers, and at some point it stands to reason that we will want to generate ad revenue to support our growth. Those ads will most likely be delivered in the feeds as that's where the readers are. It's incontestable, if you publish full content feeds, the people who view those feeds are less likely to visit your site in a browser. Sites that publish these feeds are going to have to make up or that in some way.

Hopefully RSS won't go down the path of the web, where I must endure stupid flash animations that loop endlessly while playing bad music, which I can't stop. This would obviously compromise much of the perceived value of RSS, which is, getting information without a lot of crap along with it. Dave does not want RSS compromised in this way, but can't really communicate that to the large corporations he's trying to get on board.

What many people are missing is that RSS is a perfect venue for advertising. Many companies could use RSS to announce new products and promotions instead of annoying spam mail. I'd love to have an RSS feed from Apple that announces new products, and tells me when there's going to be a sale at the apple store. I don't sign up for anything, I don't have to worry about my e-mail address getting picked up by spammers, it's the ultimate opt-in. Also, Apple could publish all of their Pro pieces in RSS. They are essentially advertising in the guide of articles about pros using their hardware. I could subscribe to a feed from buy.com that lets me track price changes on that toaster I've always wanted, but was always just out of my reach. When it gets to $40, I'm buying. There are lots of examples.

There is a huge opportunity for business to leverage RSS, you just have to find ways to use it that make it interesting, and that provide value to your customers. Hell, RSS could be the future of advertising.