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As publishers have moved towards monetizing RSS feeds, their have been vibrant discussions as to whether advertisements in feeds are viable or whether they will drive subscribers away. At the end of the day while it appears that many are discussing the philosophical approaches to ads in RSS feeds few are taking the time to examine the options available for inserting advertisements in feeds.

Ultimately the advertisements served are going to determine the success of RSS as an advertising medium. The ads served must be related to the content contained in the feed. If the RSS feed contains quality content, the ads are relevant, and the volume of ads is in balance with the volume of content served, advertising in RSS feeds will succeed.

Take a closer look at some of the ad serving options currently available for RSS feeds.

Review of Current Options

Google AdSense for Feeds
Google’s AdSense for Feeds offers contextually targeted advertisements, with a wide selection of advertisers. Google chooses not to divulge the percentage of revenue that is shared with the publisher, so it is difficult if not impossible to predict monthly revenue. The current Google AdSense system for feeds is tied to blogs and does not appear to be overly flexible.
http://www.google.com/adsense

Pheedo
Pheedo displays categorized advertisements rather than contextual advertisements. The upside to this is that Pheedo’s advertisements can be used in conjunction with Google AdSense or AdSense for feeds without violating Google’s contract. Pheedo works with the publisher to serve advertisements from similar or related categories associated with the feeds contents.

Pheedo’s system allows for advanced ad filtering, giving publishers control over keyword ad filtering, specific ad filtering or url filtering. Pheedo’s system also allows publishers to sell ads to existing advertisers whom they already have a relationship. The revenue split is 50% and feeds can be a sponsored flat rate advertisement or a pay-per-click advertisement, where the publisher is only paid if the advertisement is clicked.
http://www.pheedo.com

Kanoodle for Feeds
Kanoodles systems for providing advertisements for feeds is similar to Google’s but they do not have the breadth of advertisers that Google boasts. Advertisements are served based on topics, not to keywords. Kanoodle shares 50% of the revenue generated from the advertisements with the publisher serving the ad.
http://www.kanoodle.com

Evaluating Options
When evaluating feed ad serving solutions consider the following:

1. Ad Relevance
In order to generate revenue from RSS advertisements or for an advertising campaign to succeed using RSS as a channel. It is absolutely critical that the advertisements served in the feed contain related content, the more related the content the higher the likelihood that the advertisements will be of interest to the reader and clicked. Also the closer the content relates to the feeds theme the higher the likelihood the reader will have genuine interest in the product or service being advertised.

2. Ad Ratio
Publishers need to retain control over the frequency of advertisements. Readers will become frustrated with feeds that are heavily laden with advertisements and genuine content.

The advertiser is happy as they are reaching a targeted audience the publisher is happy because their advertisement is being clicked and generating revenue.

3. Clearly Denoted as Ads
The debate over editorial control and advertisements rage on. It is generally considered proper net etiquette for publishers to clearly mark advertisements to distinguish them from editorial web content. When selecting a RSS advertising partner consider the context in which the advertisements are displayed. Does it blend with the feed or site, while still being clearly marked sponsored material? Or does the content blend so well that it appear as a product or service endorsement from the publisher? Credibility and reputation online matter, and the segregation of advertisements and ensuring they are properly denoted as such will go a long way to enhance credibility with readers.

Clearly as RSS increases in popularity publishers are looking for ways to monetize their content. RSS in advertising is a logical step, and striking a balance between quality, consistent content and occasional related advertisements will lead to the success of advertising in RSS feeds. If the balance is not found, publishers may be forced to move to a subscription RSS feed model.

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You may already know that RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, but what does that mean to you and more importantly, how can you use RSS to help you make more money?

Simply put, RSS feeds are written in a computer language called XML, a special mark up language much like HTML. This means that they have mechanisms included that identify structures in a document. The structures define the content and how that content will be displayed within that document. RSS is what makes big news websites possible: RSS files are used to create a data feed which will deliver headlines, links or virtually any other piece of information to a channel viewer application, commonly called a news reader.

These readers are subscribed to certain RSS feed URL’s and constantly monitor them over the Internet, alerting the user when ever any new information has been added to the feed. So, how can you use this to your advantage as an internet marketer?

Here are the most popular ways to integrate RSS feeds into your marketing effort:

You can use RSS to supplement any email marketing you are currently doing, take advantage of RSS feeds to drive traffic to your blog or sales site or create your own RSS feeds so your messages and information show up on thousands of websites, blogs and desktops online.

Although many marketing gurus will claim that email marketing isn’t dead, with the advent of increasing spam complaints and filters coupled with the threat of viruses originating from an email, more and more people are leery of even opening your email. So even if you have a large email list, the likelihood of your emails being opened is becoming increasingly slim.

With RSS, your messages won’t ever get filtered and they will have a much higher chance of actually being read vs. email. Your marketing results can only be better when people actually read your message. You can even incorporate autoresponders in conjunction with RSS.

Including RSS feeds on your content site or blog allows you to add fully dynamic theme-related content to your web pages making your site or blog very popular with the search engines. The constantly updated content is exactly what the search engines crave and helps increase your search engine ranking, driving more traffic to your page.

Probably the best way to use RSS to help your online marketing efforts is to create your own RSS feed. This way your information will be published on any website that is using the RSS feed you are supplying that information to. There’s even automated software to submit your RSS feeds to the various directories that supply the feeds to marketers using them on their websites as described above.

RSS is still a relatively unknown method of driving traffic to websites, but is becoming more popular every day. As an internet marketer, this is a great opportunity to take advantage of this new technology before the rest of the online community jumps on the bandwagon.