RSS and Blog Advertising recap

By Vivek | December 30th, 2006 at 11:20 am ET         

As the year ends in which the graph for number of blogs coming up every moment has seen a steep upward slope and so has been the adoption of RSS feeds, I think it will be good idea to have a quick recap of companies/startups offering specialized advertising for RSS feeds, and Blog. Most of the companies offering Ad publishing services, which started in 2005/06, continue to operate in private-beta or invite only beta or early public launch stage. Stats for CTRs and revenues generated from RSS feeds are hard to come by while at the same time major blogs and blog networks reported 60% or more traffic coming through RSS feeds.

Comparing this to mobile advertising space, which has also started picking up from 2006, I am amazed at the growth of Admob. Admob has served more than 734 million mobile ad views in around 1 year of its existence. I think we have yet to come across such a formidable player in the RSS industry that gives accurate metrics for ads served or revenue generated for its publishers. Given the fact that RSS is getting integrated with Outlook, already being integrated with Thunderbird, and other feed consumption tools from major companies like  Google, I expect more mainstream RSS adoption. Number of people believe that widgets might overshadow RSS adoption, which will definitely be tested in 2007. Personally I think RSS will continue to grow more on the corporate side, while personal users will tend to use widgets. This in turn means that an increased number of publishers will be looking to monetize their content on either platform.

Anyhow enough digression from the original idea. Below are some of the options that Blog/Feed publishers have for placing ads in their RSS feeds –

FeedBurner - Prime mover in the RSS space has its own FeedBurner Ad Network. Publishers have options to review and approve CPM based Ad Campaigns, and customize ad insertion frequency in their feed and site. FeedBurner’s keeps 35% of the net advertising revenue for ads running in your feed. However FeedBurner has yet to automate signups for the publishing service that can take couple of more days to kickoff. Variety and number of advertisers in the Ad Network is another issue.

Pheedo - Pheedo is one of the oldest companies offering Feed advertising. Pheedo does CPM and CPC based text, logo, and banner ads and also offers geo-targeting capabilities for ads in RSS feeds and on-site ads. Publishers can run Pheedo Ads inside their FeedBurner managed feeds. To get started publishers just need to cut and paste Pheedo RSS ad code into their blog feed templates. Earlier in September 2006 Pheedo and Simplefeed had entered into a partnership to bring new RSS marketing tools to publishers.

Text Link Ads - Feedvertising from TLA enables placing of unobtrusive text link ads into the bottom of RSS feeds. TLA ads for feeds are available for publishers using Wordpress software and will need to install a plugin to get started.

Google Adsense - Adsense for Feeds has been in works for the past 1.5 years. I haven’t come across any reports for a definite date for the launch of a public beta. Have seen few bloggers using it though. Adsense for feeds mimics the regular Adsense in terms of placing contextual ads.

Qumana Q-Ads - Qumana has its Q-Ads service that can be place ads in your blog post, on your website, and in your RSS feed. Qumana has a DIY advertising model that runs on the logic that publisher understands his/her content best and should be selecting the ads to be placed in the blog or feed. While writing a blog post that supports Q-Ads insertion(Live Writer, Qumana Blog editor,..), publisher can “select a keyword, refine the result, and when you are satisfied .. click, a pertinent ad is placed where you have decided it belongs”. Sounds interesting but can take precious few minutes while positing an high priority news item.

Fedafi - Currently in beta for Advertisers. Registration open for Publishers. They have just launched beta of their Fedafi Wordpress Plugin that allows you to sell advertising space in your RSS feeds through their publisher network.

SimpleFeed - SimpleFeed is one of 4 softwares offered in the recently launched Intel SuiteTwo. Site does indicate that feed publishers can have image or text ads placed where and when they like.

As for specialized blog Advertising we have few additional companies offering Ad publishing services. These include Federated Media Publishing(fmpub), Performancing, and Blogads.