An RSS Refresher: FeedBurner’s Brent Hill Fires Off on the State of Feed Management
Have the advertising implications or rulebook via RSS changed in recent months? How is its effectiveness for marketers?
While some advertisers in feeds have focused on direct response, there is increasing recognition that advertising in feeds can be an effective brand advertising strategy. This is not being driven by rich media — ads in feeds are still simple executions. Rather, it’s because the feed advertising environment is very uncluttered — an ad appearing with an item in a feed is often the only advertisement on the entire screen. That’s not true of many online environments these days.
What is the major hurdle or challenge for further RSS growth and mainstream proliferation?
There are at least two things that still require improvement. First, the process of subscribing to feed content is still challenging in too many instances. Publishers and some feed-reading clients still unwittingly expose consumers to raw XML code, which can be a confusing and sometimes frustrating user experience for people new to the concept of subscribing to Web-based content. And while the aggregators — the portals, for instance — have made it easier to add feed content by clicking on “add” buttons, they’re also shielding the user base from understanding that they’re actually subscribing to feed content.
Because of that, the consumer doesn’t recognize an opportunity to subscribe to a relevant feed outside of the aggregator experience. For example, a user might be very comfortable adding content to a MyYahoo! homepage when searching the Yahoo! content store and clicking on the “plus” button. But if that “Add to Yahoo!” button doesn’t accompany a feed sign-up page on a publisher or marketer’s site, then that same person may not even recognize an opportunity to subscribe.
Secondly, there is still hesitation and confusion about what type of content makes good feed content, how many feeds should a publisher create, and how often should new posts be delivered? There’s an expectation among the RSS audience that feeds will contain enough information and be updated regularly enough that they provide utility and convenience to the user. If that’s not the case, then adoption will be stalled.
What’s been the major advance for RSS since Q2 of this year?
There are two major advances for RSS in the last 4-6 months. The first is the opportunity to add RSS feeds to more of the personalized homepages. Yahoo!, Google, MSN and AOL make it easy for members to add new RSS content. Secondly, IE7’s incorporation of a built-in feed reader is simplifying the discovery and subscription processes, which will lead to more adoption by mainstream users.
What does the future hold for feed management and RSS in the realm of online/interactive marketing and technology?
Looking ahead to 2007, we’re going to see a year where there is a lot of innovation around using RSS to deliver ad-supported content in new ways. The ads themselves will be powered by feeds, and things like widgets will “play” feed content across a wide variety of distribution points.
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