Amid intense discussion over whether advertising has a place in RSS
online ad powerhouse Overture Systems has quietly entered the game.
Overture, the search advertising division of Yahoo ,
is delivering targeted advertising into several feeds, including that of MobileTracker.net.
Overture is working with FeedBurner to deliver the ads via a system that combines
Overture’s contextual matching technology with FeedBurner’s posting and processing services.
FeedBurner acts as a clearinghouse, offering services for publishers that include
formatting into both RSS and Atom formats and tracking where and how often
feeds are displayed. That tracking ability is a crucial tool for advertising.
“Another concept was, as people start to manage feeds through us, we can
begin to also run ads in the feed for them,” Dick Costolo, CEO of
FeedBurner, told internetnews.com. He said significant interest in
delivering ads with feeds runs the spectrum from publishers and professionals to hobbyists.
Costolo said that a major challenge for RSS advertising is the diversity
of software used to read feeds.
“Unlike in the browser world, where supporting
three or four browsers gets you 99.99 percent of browsers,” he said, “in the
feed reader world, we’ve catalogued over 640 of these things.”
In fact, FeedBurner supports more than 300 different RSS clients that have more than 1000
users each. Costolo said there are many more clients that are used by a few hundred
people.
Costolo said FeedBurner also is working with Kanoodle, an ad network that
provides search keyword, contextual and behavioral targeting. Kanoodle recently
began serving ads
into blogs published via Six Apart’s hosted TypePad blogging service.
Costolo said the ad- and feed-serving systems needed to be adjusted for feeds
so that when an ad is rotated it doesn’t appear as updated content.
Jon Gales, editor of MobileTracker.net, said he wasn’t yet receiving reports on
the response to ads in his site. While the advertising service still is being
worked out, he said he jumped at the chance to be a beta tester.
“I have a feeling the
FeedBurner Overture ads will be a hit once the program starts for everyone,” he said.
“I’m pretty impressed with the targeting. I just checked the
ad on an article I wrote earlier today about T-Mobile ringtones, and the ad is for
a service to get free ringtones sent to your phone. That’s an ad the readers might
actually want to use.”
Gales said he’d had no negative feedback about the ads, which are delivered as
clickable graphics.
While there’s still idealism about an ad-free blogosphere, Paul Kedrosky, a fellow
at U.C. San Diego’s William J. von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology
Advancement, believes we’re
in a “weird” ad-free phase for the medium. Once the two major ad networks dig
in, RSS ads will be ubiquitous, he said, while ad serving and tracking will be enabled
in the next generation of readers.
Overture Services already is delivering ads into RSS
in partnership with FeedBurner, and Kedrosky expects Google to follow suit within two
quarters.
“You don’t get to skip the ads in RSS; that’s naive,” said Kedrosky. The only
difference will be that ads will be viewed inside the reader instead of on a Web page.
“It will be trailing banners, leading banners, side banners, all the stuff you’ve grown
to not like.”
