In My Experience... | Monetizing RSS. (1643)

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Monetizing RSS.
[ Posted by Dan on October 30, 2002 | 7 Comments ]

I'm sure someone else has already thought that RSS is not exactly the most commerce friendly technology to come around. It specifically avoids the user interface needed to shove adverts in your face in the from of wildly gyrating Flash based ads, pop-under ads and most other banner based ads. Sure, the RSS 0.9 spec does have an item in there for including a url to badge of some sort, but the commonly accepted size is small. Hardly the mechanism of over commercialism that would attract dollars.

Others have floated the idea of making on of the items in an RSS feed an advert, which could be useful. I suppose it wouldn't to much to deal with as a user of NetNewsWire. You'd only see a line item in the list of new articles, and could easily be ignored. In fact, more easily than a banner ad since there's no monkey to punch or urgent Windows optimization I have to execute right now (on my Mac).

The Christian Science Monitor has recently made RSS feeds available and I wonder if the only possible goal is to drive people to the site to see the adverts there. It's a stretch imho. How can RSS be monetized? The BBC has RSS feeds and I wonder what impact, if any, they have seen from making that available.

I mentioned in my last post that I was enticed by Salon to subscribe to premium content. I only learned of the article thru their RSS feed, so I suppose that's a monetizing connection. But is that measurable? (Return on Investment requires one to measure the returns, and I don't see how a visit from an RSS feed correctly translates into subscriptions for Salon.) Sure, RSS is easy to generate, and the feeds can be pretty slim making the bandwidth needed to serve it tiny.

One thing I think we can count on is that CNN won't be making full article text available thru RSS anytime soon (unlike this site which does include the entirety of a given article in the RSS feed). It's not worth it to them based on web browser based revenue schemes (eg, you go to website using a browser, and see lots of big adverts).

One form of monetization for RSS is the sort that aggragation companies use.

For example, NewsKnowledge.com charges between $40 and $180 a month for a single news feed updated anywhere from twice a day to every 15 minutes.

Moreover charges an ungodly amount of money for their business service.

I can't remember what other companies we looked at, but they were all rather expensive for what we'd planned to use it for.

-Posted by JC on October 30, 2002 12:55 PM

While your RSS feed technically contains your whole post, the Userland Radio aggregator sees only an excerpt of your posts because it seems to render the element (which is just an excerpt) and not the element (which contains the full post).

-Posted by Don Philtrodt on October 30, 2002 04:21 PM

Oops. MT ate a bit of my post. I'm referring to the "description" element vs. the "content:encoded" element.

-Posted by Don Philtrodt on October 30, 2002 04:22 PM

I am just afraid that as companies push (no pun intended) to get ad revenue from rss feeds NetNewsWire will just become another browser.

The who thrill of NNW is getting all the info I want w/o the crap. As we all know, companies exist to increase the amount of crap in your life (or something like that).

-Posted by josh on October 30, 2002 05:04 PM

Can that be done to RSS? Being an open format that people can choose to adopt or not? If AdvertRSS 1.0 comes out, will anyone use it?

-Posted by Dan on October 30, 2002 07:32 PM

Well, I have always seen RSS as a form of advertising in itself. What I really don't understand is why so many big sites don't make feeds available for non-commercial use (probably 2/3 of those I've seen are this way). If I wantto put links to your content on your ad driven site why would you care if I am a commercial entity?

To the person who mentioned the newsknowledge feed, were those prices for just one rss for one site or for all their sites? 180 would be peanuts for a centralized way to manage a bunch of rss feeds (at least to me)

If danger (makers of the tmobile sidekick) opens their developer program (or allows me in) I have two things I want to do on it. One is ssh client and the other is an rss reader.

P.s. This site doesnlt do too bad on my sidekick, though I have to scroll through a few screens at the top of each page. Perhaps a lite version would be a good excercise in ui design ;)

-Posted by eric on November 1, 2002 03:23 AM

have tried news4sites - moderate pricing and easy setup

-Posted by martin spunk on January 24, 2003 08:53 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).