Technophiles have taken to pulling their content in via RSS
two XML-based syndication formats. Feed readers grab it in a text-only format, letting
subscribers read the headline and in some cases the lead paragraph as soon as it’s published. Sans ads.
Early on, most feeds came from bloggers who wrote to express themselves or to
raise their profiles and get speaking or book gigs. Now, publications including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal make at least their headlines
available as feeds.
Both sides grapple with the issue of how to make money from feeds.
There are the bloggers who may write for
love and would love some money. Advertising networks have opened up contextual advertising
on their blog pages; now, they’d like to glean a bit more revenue from their text feeds.
Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner, a company that provides syndication services for
content providers, said the demand for ad support runs the gamut of publishers, although
their requirements are different.
“Commercial publishers need to understand how to have
much better demographic information about who their subscribers are,” he said. “The
hobbyists are happy to make whatever they can off the blog — and double that in the feed.
The more serious bloggers are in the middle, trying to figure out the best way to monetize
the feed.”
With new software and ad services coming up to speed, bloggers shouldn’t have to work
specifically on monetizing feeds, said Andrew Anker, executive vice president of Six Apart,
provider of blogging software and hosted bloggers’ services.
“We don’t see HTML and RSS as
anything other than two instances of the content you create on your blog. The wonderful
thing about blog software is it separates content from presentation.”
The RSS/Atom feed business model won’t look that different, according to David Hornik,
a partner in venture firm August Capital, which has invested in blog-search service
Technorati.
“The broad spectrum of opportunities to make money in the content business
on the Web today will apply to RSS businesses ultimately,” he said.
Hornik thinks that
contextual advertising will be especially important as an ad model for feeds, because those
that come from blogs tend to be about discrete topics.
While the audiences may be different, Anker said, “Ads in your HTML vs. ads in feeds
vs. what you might do on a cell phone or other device — it’s all the same thing.”
In fact, Kanoodle, an online ad network that’s been serving ads into blogs and feeds
since the summer, treats them no differently from online publications.
“A blog about pets
and Cat Fancy magazine online are both completely contextually relevant [for advertisers],”
said Kanoodle president Lance Podell. “We look at [feeds] the same as the rest of our contextual
work.”
Traditional Web publishers are experiencing a new kind of disintermediation: the
inability to insert ads between content and readers.
Those publishers with their own advertising bases must insert ads back into their feeds
to maintain their businesses, said Paul Kedrosky, a fellow at U.C. San Diego’s William J.
von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement. He said more advanced feed readers will help ad
networks and publishers track ad views and responses.
“You’ll be able to track and charge
different rates for RSS ads based on who [the feed] is going to and how closely you can target
the message. It will not be that much different from what you’re already doing,” he said.
Which is not to say there won’t be some twists. PubSub, a company that lets people subscribe
to receive fresh content that matches search-like queries, will insert ads into those feeds.
But the company has plans for new ways to make money from feeds.
CTO Bob Wyman said PubSub already is charging companies for private data feeds, such as
for very particular kinds of searches or for results restricted to certain users. Next, it
plans to provide feeds that treat ads like content.
“Once we’ve worked out all the technologies for creating feeds, distributing them, finding
them, and telling people when a feed has been updated, what we do next is start dealing with
things other than text, like job postings, offers to sell, or current weather and earthquake
reports,” Wyman said. “We’ll be treating ads just like content. It will cause a drastic change
in the way the system works.”
For example, people wanting to rent an apartment won’t have to camp out in front of the
newspaper office to get a jump on the morning edition’s listings, he said. “You’ll know the
minute the person hits the return key and publishes the ad.
“The really big opportunity to monetize RSS/Atom isn’t going to come from
advertising in blogs,” Wyman continued. “It is going to come from the indirect effect of creating a whole new way
for businesses to publish information and communicate with their customers.”
