Feed powered advertising

RSS feeds have long been a location for advertisement for commercial products or services. We have seen FeedBurner introduce FeedFlare, a way for publishers to add content into their feed during syndication - for example a 'Digg this' link/count, or a custom FeedFlare which promotes another website. TLA introduced a similar service, called Feedvertising - which enables publishers to include messages or simple text advertisements in their feed. However, neither of these services treat the feed content as the advert.

We have also seen the arrival of feed powered ads where the content of an advert hosted on a website is provided via an RSS feed. A good example is the RSS-powered advertising model on Gabe Rivera's popular news tracking site Techmeme. Although not new at the time (CNET, nooked, Pheedo and others had done this before) this concept has become increasingly utilized on the Web because it offers the advertiser a level of control over the advertisement content that is not possible via other CPC (cost-per-click) or CPM (cost per thousand impressions) based advertising systems.

A benefit of RSS-powered ads is that the advertiser can update their advert at any point, to respond to daily news or address a particular issue - or perhaps just to become part of the conversations that are constantly happening in the blogosphere. It also, as both Wilson and Jeff Jarvis pointed out, makes the advertising more relevant to the content of its host site. In the case of Techmeme, the RSS-driven sponsor ads offer tech news stories which blend in well that Techmeme's content - which makes the ads more relevant, which enhances the advertiser's brand and the click-thrus.