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Kiran Aditham is a Business Management grad from the University of Central Florida, Aditham earned his stripes as a freelance writer in music/arts publishing.

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Feedburner’s Brent Hill Fires Off on the RSS Feeding Frenzy

Written on
April 12th 2006
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by Kiran Aditham  |
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But still, as the ADOTAS RSS survey mentions, RSS advertising only has a modicum of interest (7.6%) from ad:tech attendees, with many still citing it as an “experiment” and a way to spend surplus cash flow more than anything else. But then again, banner ads were given the same half-empty observations in the days of yore.

Accordingly, Feedburner’s Hill says we’ve already gotten beyond the pleasantries with RSS, as it’s now entering the next stage of marketing awareness. “Enough companies have done their early trials with advertising in feeds, and we’re now moving toward more strategic planning and how it fits into the overall interactive marketing network. More and more of the interactive marketing plan is coming out of agencies and out of companies directly. [RSS advertising] may not be nearly as big as programs that are going to run with the portals, and other much larger interactive media categories, but it’s starting to become part of most plans, and it’s growing.”

Case in point, Hill says the above metrics highlighting Feedburner’s subscriber base and publisher reach are a far cry from last year’s tally. “A year ago, we had about 35,000 feeds, and we distributed 225,000 subscriptions every day. The number of subscriptions and the size of the audience are directly related to how much ad inventory you have to bring to the advertiser. The difference between 11 million subscriptions delivered every day and 25,000 is obviously very big.”

But every path to glory comes with a few hurdles. While other forms of interactive advertising rely on rich media and assorted eye candy to sell products, RSS has certain limitations that might preclude buyers and advertisers from investing high-end creative into it. Though Hill concedes that maturity doesn’t happen overnight, he’s optimistic of RSS’ evolution in this area. “Feeds primarily are text-based, and they are kind of a low-res type of media. We’ve developed ad units that are designed to fit into this media, using more text ads than display ads, and the display ads have been simple 468×60 banners. So if you compare that to Pointroll and other types of ads that you can run on sites, that’s one big difference. The creative flexibility that you have in feeds is a little more restrained right now than what you have on sites. And I think that’s just a maturity issue—sites and advertising have come a long way in the last ten years. Feed advertising is basically only a year old.”

So what needs to happen to take RSS to the next level, especially in terms of being a viable advertising outlet? For one thing, says Hill, it’s bringing feeds to the masses and not just the early adopters. “What’s coming is technology from Microsoft and others that make subscribing to feeds a much easier thing. That will drive more mainstream adoption and drive adoption numbers up and the audience size up. Then, on the other side, I think that you’ll see publishers—as they get more comfortable distributing content in this manner, in a syndicated fashion, especially knowing that they can monetize it—I think you’ll start to see feeds gain in utility. Right now, the utility is the headline, the text of the news item, and then you go onto the next one.”

Additionally on the publisher side, Hill adds, “People are developing new capabilities that we call ‘feed flair’. They are simple things like email to a friend, email the author, how many comments are back on the blog for this news item. It’s an open API, and I think you’ll see a set of web servers developed specifically for feed content to enhance what the publishers are putting in there. Some of that may be graphical. It may not be rich with movie picture, or audio that you click on and you can play right there…but I do think the feeds in there are getting more diverse. I think you’ll see some variation in the user-interface design as well.”

But the argument can be made that the rapid-fire, flexible delivery of RSS could be hindered by an overload of graphic-heavy add-ons. Regardless, Brent Hill and Feedburner are pursuing RSS innovation, in whatever shape or form it may take. “We constantly think about innovation around publisher services,” he says. “We recently announced a new set of statistics to get publishers insight into how many individuals within their subscriber base have actually interacted with a content site. So, for example, you and I might subscribe to a feed, and we might open our feed reader, but it doesn’t mean we’ve interacted with the content. As soon as we do, people are starting to measure that. We got more clear with our definition of subscriber… we added another level of detail with subscribers, and then a reach number as well.”

He says it’s the knowledge of one’s consumer base that could set the tone for RSS development, and Feedburner is more than happy to light the match. “There’s more insight into how consumers are using their feed than we have on the drawing board,” says Hill. “For example, you have power users within your subscriber-base. Because right now, you think every subscriber’s the same, that’s clearly not the case. I might click on every news item and consume a lot of feed, when you’re a lightweight user. And we think publishers would like to know that.” We’re betting they will.



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