• by Gavin O'Malley , Staff Writer @mp_gavin, September 1, 2005

Whether or not advertisers should be faulted for muscling in on technical innovations that were never intended to accommodate them is the subject for a debate that won't be taken up here. The reality, in the case of Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, which was designed to streamline Web users' content intake, is that advertisers recognized a threat, and addressed it.

"From its beginning, it was obvious that RSS was going to take more and more impressions away from sites as more users came to rely solely on headlines and teasers offered on RSS readers," says Bill Flitter, chief marketing officer, Pheedo, which offers tools to optimize ads in blogs and content feeds.

Blogs are largely responsible for the rise of RSS feeds. Political pundits, tech geeks, business leaders, and gossipmongers alike would be hard-pressed to track the multitude of threads that make up the blogosphere, were it not for RSS.

And now even Google has begun experimenting with ads in RSS feeds, using a computerized system to match ads to content. Yahoo! Search Marketing also uses a computerized system.

"So much valuable content is delivered via RSS feeds, and until now, the challenge for publishers has been finding an effective revenue source for these sites," says Jim Pitkow, president and CEO of Moreover Technologies, a provider of aggregated online news service systems for companies, including Microsoft's MSN, Yahoo!, and Ask Jeeves.

With the help of Moreover's services, contextual advertising services provider Kanoodle recently introduced BrightAds RSS, which will help advertisers serve ads via RSS. Mark Josephson, Kanoodle's senior vice president of marketing, explains that RSS is no different from any of the content-delivery systems that existed before it, with advertising an inevitable part of the equation.

Josephson says it's in businesses' best interests to preserve the core value of RSS as they enter the space. "We want to do everything we can to empower consumers and improve their experience, but at the end of the day we will be part of that experience."