SwellPath Interactive

As Google begins to cash in on its $100 million dollar investment in FeedBurner, marketers need to ask themselves if pursuing ads within RSS is worthwhile.

As an online marketing specialist, I am prone to embrace emerging revenue streams for my clients – just like anyone, I want to try out the shiny new toy. But ultimately I am responsible for returning a high (hopefully, ungodly) ROI to my clients, and much like social media, I recommend allocating a small percentage of your budget to testing if RSS can be right for you.

Approximately 11% of users use RSS according to a consumer adoption poll. Although many websites use RSS to aggregate their news feed, widget, or in other applications on their site, 11% is a fair estimate of how many users subscribe to an RSS feed (although that number is climbing – up from 9% last year).

Based on a ProBlogger poll, only 1/3 of bloggers run advertisements on their RSS feeds, but again the number is growing (up from 1/4 last year).

Advertising within RSS feeds is not exactly a new medium. Even before Google got in the mix, FeedBurner and RSS advertising networks such as Pheedo have been offering marketers an opportunity to reach consumers through their feeds. Over time, we have come to learn the best methods for advertising within feeds including some that may seem counter intuitive.

Advertising on RSS is more like advertising in a magazine than advertising in paid search. You cannot successfully sell iPods to subscribers of Apple’s RSS feed as they are already aware of every Apple product months ahead of launch. You would be much better off selling a new iPhone App or Belkin iPod accessories.

With RSS advertising, marketers should focus on what their potential customers are reading rather than buying. This largely untapped medium will only become more apparent as the adoption rate of RSS continues to grow.