IMV24 : RSS Advertising

The following is a transcript for IMV24 : RSS Advertising. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo, Episode 24. I’m your host Ted Murphy and with me today is Brent Hill, vice president of business development for FeedBurner. Welcome to the show today, Brent.

Brent Hill:

Good morning, Ted. Thank you very much for having us.

Ted Murphy:

Brent, we’re here to talk today about RSS advertising and obviously FeedBurner is a huge player in the RSS market. I was wondering if you could start off by telling our listeners a little bit about FeedBurner, the services you offer. And then we’ll kind of jump into RSS advertising and the future.

Brent Hill:

Sure. Well, Ted, we have a big footprint in RSS as you know. We manage over 325,000 feeds for publishers ranging from individual bloggers up to blog networks to the largest commercial publishers in the world like Reuters and USA TODAY.

Ted Murphy:

And you handle our feeds.

Brent Hill:

Right. We handle your feeds. Your feed is one of those and we’re happy to have you on board. There are about 200,000 other publishers just like you that use FeedBurner. And when you combine all of those feeds together, we send out about 18 million subscriptions per day.

And the growth rate there – a year ago we had less than half of that number. So the growth rate has been material for month to month. We continue to just see sequential growth for all of our feed publishers to the size of their audience. Their audiences are building from month to month.

About 56,000 of those feeds and about 3.3 million of that reach number is for video and podcast and audio feeds. So, that number has grown as well. I think that not surprising to you would be that last year was all about text feeds primarily in 2005. And in ‘06 we’ve seen a faster growth rate among audio and video feeds than the text feeds.

Ted Murphy:

So before we get into the specifics of the FeedBurner ad network and the types of services you guys offer, can you tell us a little bit about the overall market for RSS advertising. How are people using it? What do you see going on in the industry?

Brent Hill:

Yeah. Well, there are a couple of observations. One is that in the last year what’s happened is – and this is really what creates the opportunity for advertisers I think – is that we’ve gone from individual bloggers being the big users of RSS because they automatically have a feed coming from their blog software platform created for them to the adoption by big commercial publishers.

And so once all the big media companies have gotten involved, and that’s from newsprint to online media to newspaper and broadcasts, almost every media company now has feeds available. And once they start to gain audience for that, it doesn’t take long before marketers want access to those audiences.

And one of the big drivers is that – I’ll just give you an example. If I’m a software company and I typically advertise in technology media whether it’s print or online, there could be a big portion of that audience now that’s receiving that content from that publisher via the feed and subscribing to that content and receiving it to their desktop via feed. And may not be visiting the Web site as often as they did in the past.

And it’s forcing marketers to think about how they’re going to get access to those markets as people select the content and receive it on their desktop. And advertising in the feed itself is a monetization strategy for the publisher that just makes a lot of sense. And it helps the marketers on the other end of this.

As content continues to get more fragmented and people can pick among feeds and U2 videos and text feeds from publishers to receive and that they can subscribe to, marketers need help in putting those fragmented audiences back together. And that’s where ad networks like ours can really help.

Ted Murphy:

And how exactly does your ad network work? I know that I actually went in there and I’ve checked it out. And it seems relatively easy to use. Any marketer could go in there and if they’ve got some basic knowledge of the Internet they can go in there and start putting ads up there.

Brent Hill:

That’s right. The first thing we tried to do with the ad network was make it very recognizable to media planners and buyers. And the way we did that was we organized the content into content categories like arts and entertainment, computing and technology. And every time we had a significant number of publishers, subscribers and advantage ad opportunities in a channel, we opened it up for advertising. And we now have 12 of those.

In fact, some of those categories are getting so big that we’re now starting to segment within there. Another example is computing and technology. That’s a very broad category. We can now segment the Mac market from personal computing from enterprise computing to help advertisers better target their message.

And the first thing we did was organize the feeds from these different publishers into content categories to allow advertisers to give them some kind of targeting platform for advertising in feeds.

And then we introduced ad units that were also something they were familiar with. It’s primarily a text-based media so we introduced text ads as the first ads that we started layering into feeds about a year ago. From there we advanced to 468 by 60 display ads, banner ads.

And a lot of our advertisers their advertising in feeds campaigns were probably not the biggest component of their online media spent. And so what we allowed them to do was advertise in feeds and re-use a lot of the creative assets they were running in other ad campaigns. And I think that was a big hit with a lot of the interactive agencies that have used FeedBurner in the last year.

Ted Murphy:

So if I were to decide to purchase RSS advertising in a targeted feed to us in let’s say current affairs and politics, what are some of the ways that I could measure ROI and what are the costs associated with doing something like this?

Brent Hill:

Right. Sure. So let’s first talk about the pricing. Advertisers are buying access to an audience for a given publisher so the rate cart that’s been developed and the pricing format that kind of follows an audience buy is a cost per 1,000 impressions, the CPM rate.

And we’ve introduced pricing for each of those channels based on the demographics and supply and demand of media. So let’s say that you pick the current affairs and politics channel. That has a certain rate. And I’ll just say it’s $6.00 per thousand impressions.

The first thing to make this all work is it has to be measurable. And FeedBurner is very good at measuring subscribers and item use for our feed publishers. We’ve been doing that for several years. And as we introduced our ad network we made sure that we could measure impression delivery, click-through rates, and ad performance for advertisers like yourself.

So, you would pick the current affairs and politics category. You’d choose your start and end dates for your ad campaign, how many impressions and what your budget is, and off we go.

And during the course of that ad campaign, we’d look at how different pieces of creative were performing. We can rotate ads during the campaign and change things out to optimize the campaign. And from there on – and again it’s very recognizable to a media planner because it’s an ad server that’s rotating ads and providing performance data back to them.

Another key thing that we had to develop very early on was a lot of the bigger interactive ad agencies use a third-party ad server for traffic in their ads because they’re running ads on lots of different media providers and ad networks. So we supported third-party ad servers whether it’s Atlas or DoubleClick very early on and that’s helped us work with a lot of the bigger ad agencies.

Ted Murphy:

So, you mention that the earlier ads were text based and then you kind of moved to the banner ads. What does the future hold? Are people going to be able to append either audio to podcasts or video to video podcasts? What are the limits in terms of what you guys are gonna be able to do?

Brent Hill:

Yeah. I think there are really probably two different questions in there and two different issues.

One is we do think that RSS has traditionally been very utilitarian. Headline and the text of the item in the feed. And then we developed the set of services called FeedFlare that allows our publishers to add interactivity like email the author, email it to a friend, look up the number of comments. We added that layer of services about three to six months ago. And it’s been quite popular.

We do think that people will dress up their feeds and add more links to them whether it’s links to podcasts and audio feeds. That’s one question is how will content change that’s going into feeds today?

And it continues to evolve. We see more linking and cross-pollination of feeds among publishers and we think that will continue.

The second question is will feeds get richer over time? And that’s unclear to us because one of the nice things about RSS is it’s a light-weight media. The feeds are easy to deliver to a variety of devices whether it’s a mobile phone or a desktop reader. And while you do see probably more pictures and graphics involved in feed content today, especially among some of the more popular blogs, it’s unclear whether it’s going to evolve to have the same moving pictures and flash ads and everything else.

One of the things that has to change is some of the feed readers don’t support high res media today so Java script and some other things that we need in order to make – that really power some of the more interactive web sites that we’re all used to today – simply aren’t supported yet in feed readers. And if that changes, then we’ll see if content gets richer. And if the content gets richer, I expect that the ad units will follow that.

Ted Murphy:

So, are there any ways for the smaller bloggers and podcasters to monetize their RSS and start getting paid for syndicating their content as well?

Brent Hill:

There sure are. And in FeedBurner’s case it extends from not just the feed but also back to their site.

What happened recently was a lot of the bloggers have been using Ad Sense or Yahoo search marketing or one of the paid search platforms on their sites for a long time. And then FeedBurner started managing their feed. We welcomed a lot of those bloggers into our ad network and put them into the appropriate channel and started layering feeds in and everybody was happy.

Some of those publishers came to us and said, “Listen, you do a great job managing my feed. Can you help me with ad programs back on my site?”

And FeedBurner’s in a very good position to offer advertising back on the site. Because we manage the feed, we see the publisher’s content. We understand what it looks like back on their site.

And so we introduced our Ads On Sites program June 1. We’ve already run our first ad campaigns in there. And what our publishers do is just use a little bit of Java script and they’ve enabled FeedBurner ads back on their Web site.

So, we like the program because it gives us access to an entire publisher’s audience meaning not only just their feed subscribers but also their site visitors day to day. And our advertisers like that.

The second thing is from a publisher’s standpoint, now they have one partner that they can work with to monetize their content whether it’s distributed via the feed or back on the site. And that program’s off to a terrific start. We have lots and lots of blogs that have signed up for it and we’re welcoming more to the Ads On Sites network every day.

Ted Murphy:

Well, Brent, let me go to one of our listener voice mails real quick and we’ll see if we can help this guy out.

Gus:

Good morning, Ted. This is Gus from Baltimore. Great show. And I was actually hoping you could help me shed some light on RSS.

In your experience, have you seen or heard of any statistics as to who the general market for RSS feeds is? Does it tend to be, you know, the affluent male or female or maybe Gen Y? What segment really is subscribing mostly to RSS feeds? Thanks and looking forward to the next show.

Brent Hill:

Got it, Ted. So, your listener’s question was all about RSS demographics and we pay very close attention to that. It’s what some of our advertisers ask us about every day. We’ve surveyed a lot of the audience of our feed readers and in order to understand the subscribers by different content categories.

And, in general, I would say the following about the RSS subscribers and their demographics:

On household income, they index higher. There are more subscribers with a household income of $75,000.00 or more than there are for the Internet population in general.

It skews much heavily more toward male. You will find some studies that say the online audience is a little bit more male skewed than female but in feeds it’s well more skewed than that. It indexes high for males over females. About 70 percent male to 30 percent female right now.

Now, that’s the broad market in general. There are certain content categories like arts and entertainment that are more balanced. More 50/50 on the gender split.

Feed subscribers index high on education levels and if you look at their age categories, this is probably not a surprise given the early adopters and their age groupings. But the 18 to 24s and the 25 to 34s index high again versus the online audience in general by about 10 percentage points. So that must mean that those percentage points are coming from some other group, and it’s the older gender group that is not as well represented among feed subscribers. The 45 to 54 and a little less so among the 35 to 44s.

So that’s a look at RSS demographics in general from what we’ve seen with our audience surveys.

Ted Murphy:

So, we’ve talked a lot about incorporating advertising inside of RSS feeds but I think that RSS is actually a way for a lot of people to escape all of that other content and clutter that a lot of websites have become in order to generate money.

So, would you say that there’s a risk in including advertising in your RSS feed? And are there any best practices that you could suggest for making that – if you are gonna include that advertising – as least as offensive as possible?

Brent Hill:

Yep. I think that most people these days understand that we can’t change the economics of media production and get all the content we want for free and all the different formats we want it in for free. And we’ve lived with that for web sites for a lot of the big media companies that have evolved to be heavily advertising supported. But, as consumers of that media we understand that somebody has to pay for great editorial and great writers and everything else that publishers do for us.

The same thing is going to be true with feeds. You can’t have completely different economics than the rest of the media business. And that’s why you’re seeing publishers offer up a lot of content in RSS format but they’re also working on optimization strategies working with us and others to get advertising into that type of content.

I think that what publishers can do is balance advertising with editorial the same way they do in their magazines and other media and the same thing they do on the web sites.

And I’ll give you an example of this. When FeedBurner introduced advertising into feeds, if you put advertising back on a site, you draw circles around where the ads go and where the content areas are and there’s some kind of balance that most publishers follow. Whether it’s 50/50, there is some balance of content to advertising.

And in feeds we had to introduce some kind of similar control. And the way we did this was we just gave publishers an opportunity to specify a frequency with which they want ads inserted into their content. One ad every two news items. One ad every three news items. One ad every four news items. And that’s how they’ve been able to balance advertising with content.

I can definitely say that if you look across most publishers today that RSS content distribution is more heavily skewed toward content than advertising more so than any other online media. If you just literally counted the ads and looked at how much content is available on a feed, you’d find that there’s very little advertising.

It’s a new media where the content distribution has taken off much more quickly than the monetization on the back end. And that’s what FeedBurner and some others are trying to solve. Helping these publishers monetize that type of content distribution.

Ted Murphy:

So dovetailing into that, what are the top three things that publishers and advertisers should know about RSS advertising?

Brent Hill:

For publishers, I think that the No. 1 item on the list would be make your feeds available, help your audience find them and then try to gain subscribers. It is a great time in kind of the audience development curve to try to be gaining subscribers because long term there is going to be competition for attention just like there is in other media.

And if you are a publisher right now, you’ve made feeds available but you’re hiding them down at the bottom of your home page and you’re not really encouraging people to subscribe, then I think you are going to fall behind. And the publishers that try to gain audience right now and the subscribers over time will be very valuable. Just like we all know that email addresses captured for an email list are very valuable.

So, that’s my three things for publishers. Start making feeds. Start promoting them on your site. And get aggressive about audience development and gaining subscribers.

On the advertiser side, we found ad campaigns for a variety of different industries. I can’t say there are any industries that shouldn’t be participating. Even if you look at the RSS adoption, whether it’s 8 percent, 10 percent, 12 percent, pick a number. The adoption rate for the Internet audience using feeds. If you multiply that by the size of your Internet audience, you’re still talking about millions of potential subscribers that marketers want to reach.

So, across most industries if not all it’s time to start incorporating RSS into your media plans because it’s a great way to reach the audience. There are several advantages. They’ve opted into the content. It’s a very uncluttered advertising environment. And the ads perform like they do for other interactive media. It’s measurable and you can look at it on an ROI basis or cost per interaction basis just like you do with other interactive.

Ted Murphy:

Well, Brent, I appreciate you coming on the show today. If our listeners have any other questions that they’d like us to answer about RSS advertising or any other topic, please leave us a message toll free at 866-206-4461.

Brent, we wish you good luck at FeedBurner and I hope to have you back on the show again in the future.

Brent Hill:

Okay, Ted. Thanks for having us on and thanks for using FeedBurner.

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit http://www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

Marketing Resources
Download Top Ten Things to Know About RSS Advertising(PDF - 674.0KB)

Listen to the RSS Advertising podcast.

Contact MindComet about creating a personalized brand experience through RSS.

Subscribe to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast in iTunes.

Technorati Tags
FeedBurner, feeds,RSS,syndication, feed