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Ads in RSS Feeds -- Reading Between the Lines
There's been some back and forth in blogland about Infoworld's inserting ads into RSS feeds, and Jenny at Shifted Librarian has a good wrapup of where folks stand in this entry: InfoWorld Adds Ads To Its RSS Feeds. At Medscape, our RSS feeds, which were launched a few months ago, are doing well for us. The number of people using them is growing on a month over month basis and, although the raw numbers are pretty low compared to overall readership on our site, we'll be happy to see it keep growing.
<corporate hedge> For now </corporate hedge>, I agree with Dave W. and Jenny that the main purpose for a media company to issue feeds is to get people to their site, NOT serve ads. Jenny cites this interesting paragraph from Infoworld:
RSS allows a Web site's top stories to be summarized in XML, then pushed to a user's desktop automatically. While publishers naturally hope an RSS feed will inspire readers to click through to the host Web site, there's the danger some will never delve further than the headlines, cutting into ad revenues. Hence, the desire to monetize the RSS feed itself.
Excuse me? Infoworld is not pushing full text content to the user's desktop, only headlines. I understand what they are concerned about, because that's the argument everyone uses. In plain English, it boils down to this..."We know a certain number of ad impressions on our site can be attributed to people who come to the site to see what we've published that day, are uninterested in anything we have to say, and then go away. If we send headlines to those folks over RSS, we'll lose those pageviews."
Putting ads in RSS feeds is the wrong solution to this problem. The correct solution is actually extremely simple. Publish stories that people want to read. Make them compelling and well written. Provide depth in articles. If you are posting stories where the headline says more than the body, you've got bigger problems than deciding what to do with your RSS feeds. Have faith in your content and trust your readers and they will repay you many times over with a level of loyalty far above the norm.
8:43:56 AM 
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