• by Ross Fadner , April 7, 2004

RSS, or XML Syndication, has the potential to offer unique and targeted advertising opportunities to online publishers and the marketers they want to attract.

Even though the majority of XML Syndication activity exists in community blogs frequented by tech-geeks, information technology (IT) professionals, and other types of early adopters, an advertising market is beginning to evolve.

Robert Scoble, a technology evangelist for Microsoft Corp., notes that lack of visual stimulus and clutter drives the functionality of an RSS feeder. He says it enables the user to scan content more easily and without distraction. The market opportunity for advertisers is via text ads.

"In my RSS news aggregator, "I'm able to scan a large number of stories or content very quickly without having to be distracted by color, by advertising," Scoble says, continuing: "but I'm not talking about advertising--like text ads, because I think there's actually going to be advertising in RSS. Google figured out a very effective way of advertising, which is to use text, because the human eye can process that very quickly and not get distracted."

Chris Pirillo, technology evangelist and publisher of the IT weblog LockerGnome.com, claims to be one of the pioneers of RSS advertising. "Lockergnome, as a publisher, has been advertising in our RSS feeds from day one." Pirillo claims that the advertising works because it's done smartly. "Just as we would have a good content-to-advertising ratio in our newsletters or on a Web page, we do the same thing in our RSS feeds, and I think that's key."

Alan Schulman, chief creative officer of Brand New World, believes that "eventually there's an ad model to evolve out of this," but adds that, as always, "advertisers will wait and see." Schulman says that RSS is "just an enabling technology right now," but adds that it represents "aggregation meeting its potential on a personalized one-to-one level."

Schulman says that initially, publishers may be sensitive to the fact that their content is being appropriated into a sort of commoditized news- package, marginalizing their brand in the process, but he adds that (news aggregation) seems to be the evolution of content consumption. Should XML Syndication become a primary channel for news aggregation, he says that creating a healthy ad market through RSS readers will become very important.

LockerGnome's Pirillo, IT professionals, and other early adopters claim that user control will drive RSS adoption. However, the sheer amount of content that can be fed through syndication could leave users overwhelmed unless there is a means of sorting, or filtering it, says Joi Ito, former chairman of InfoSeek Japan and current lead researcher for mobile technology firm Technorati. "I think you will see that different types of filtering [are] going to happen; filtering by a friend of a friend, filtering by keywords, filtering relevancy, filtering by authority--and I think that's where this technology will evolve," Ito explains.

Chad Williams, president and CEO of RSSAds, certainly hopes so. Williams' company is an ad network for publishers to RSS feeders. He says that RSSAds has already signed a number of advertisers, mainly blog publishers, although deals with several "well-known" news organizations have also been made. Williams declined to name the specific publishers. RSSAds will start serving ads in a few months.

Williams maintains that RSS allows for minutely targeted advertising because RSS feeders track users' behavior. Anyone using an RSS feeder is essentially aggregating content of their own choosing. An algorithm that scans the content in a person's feeder could ostensibly deliver personalized messages to each user.