RSS Advertising, Coming Fast
BY Dave Morgan | April 7, 2005
It’s hard to keep up with all the new developments in online advertising these days. We’ve just gotten the hang of selling and delivering Web-based advertising solutions, permission-based e-mail, search, and contextual ads. Together, these constitute over $10 billion in annual ad spending. Yet, the development community continues to deliver an ever-growing array of new interactive consumer channels and touch points.
Some recent developments aren’t surprising. Technologies such as addressable video ads, commercial SMS (define), and broadcast-quality streaming video are relatively straightforward and have been long anticipated. Others, such as blogs, podcasting (define), user-generated tagging, and RSS (define), were far less predictable, and their advertising applications are still much debated. Whether and how each will fulfill its promise as a powerful online advertising channel may not be determined for years… except for RSS.
Why RSS? Because consumer usage is already large and growing fast; more important, because RSS advertising effectiveness is finally becoming measurable.
RSS has been around for years. Developed by Netscape engineers in 1997, the technology permits users to directly receive content feeds from publishers and other content creators. It provides an open and efficient method for digital content syndication. It received little attention outside the hardcore Web content management community until 2001. It wasn’t seriously considered a major consumer distribution and contact channel by the online advertising community until 2003.
Analysts and pundits have predicted for years RSS use could eclipse the Web or e-mail as the primary method for receiving and viewing content by some consumers. Yet many in the industry haven’t paid those predictions much heed. Given RSS’ acceleration over the past year or so, those predictions may not be wrong.
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