VIA Interaction

Tuesday, July 05, 2005

Where eyeballs go, advertising will follow

One of the benefits of using an RSS reader to collect news and blog items is that it behaves like an email newsletter subscription (you get only content that you want) while enabling you to avoid the spam and junk mail that you have to wade through in your inbox.

However, as The New York Times is reporting (Marketers See Opportunity as a Web Tool Gains Users, advertising-supported syndicated XML is on its way.

(Indeed, Feedster already will insert an ad, if it has sold one in the context of your search, into its XML feeds.)

From the Times article:

"THE fledgling R.S.S. business is starting to attract some attention from those catering to Internet advertisers.

"Google, Pheedo, Feedster and Yahoo Search Marketing are all peddling advertising options for R.S.S., an increasingly popular way of having a personal computer automatically retrieve information from the Internet.

"For example, R.S.S. users interested in local weather could view forecast updates on their computers without having to visit a particular Web site.

"Some big companies, like Verizon, are starting to buy space in the R.S.S. information streams, which are selected anonymously and pulled from Web sites by a PC.

"R.S.S. may be getting bigger soon. Microsoft has announced that R.S.S. - the abbreviation stands for Really Simple Syndication - will be integrated into its next Windows operating system. Microsoft's announcement makes it more likely that R.S.S., used for years only by the tech-savvy, will become more of a mainstream computer tool. R.S.S. was helped last year when Yahoo put it on My Yahoo pages.

"R.S.S. is somewhat like TiVo for the Internet. By letting people have content pulled from Web sites and fed to their own computers automatically, they can then store it for later viewing. The growing number of R.S.S. users has some online publishers - they are now the biggest group of suppliers of R.S.S. feeds - starting to worry that R.S.S. could take eyeballs away from their existing advertisements on the Web.

"The washingtonpost.com, part of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, for example, is considering ways to insert ads into its R.S.S. feeds, which currently include only headlines and links to articles on the paper's own site. 'Anytime a medium attracts a large audience, people begin to think through and figure out ways to deliver ads to that audience,' said Tim Ruder, vice president of marketing for Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive. 'R.S.S. won't be any different in that regard than any other medium.' ..."

posted by Tim Beidel at 7/05/2005 11:26:00 AM

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