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Momentum is building for delivery of news and other content by RSS. Mark Rogers looks at the workings and business potential of what some are calling the biggest thing since the invention of the web browser...

Momentum is building for the delivery of news and other content by RSS. So how does it work and what's the business potential of what some people are calling the biggest leap forward for the internet since the invention of the web browser...

By Mark Rogers

[Register and post your own comments on this article below...]

“Marketers just don’t understand it yet. They are just doing sales. And advertisers! They’re still using banners 468 pixels wide,” Sabrina Dent, Managing Editor of blog publisher Mink Media is talking about RSS. “It could deliver real value for advertisers, but they need to understand what it can do.” Jemima Kiss, News Editor of the website journalism.co.uk is enthusiastic: “It is so much easier to manage and skim a load of content using RSS than it is to use email.” Rok Hrastnik of Marketing Studies agrees: “RSS can really help marketers improve their existing content delivery activities, such as e-zine publishing.”

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) consists of two deceptively simple protocols. The first protocol consists of a channel name, e.g. “Politics blog”, then a summary of the content, consisting of a title and a link, e.g. “Reactions to French vote” and a brief description or extract, e.g. “Reactions to the French ‘no’ vote range from gloomy to jubilant...” The second protocol is a “ping” which occurs when that content is published, and alerts subscribers or remote websites that new content is available.

Different strokes for different folks

RSS means different things to different people. For bloggers like Mink Media it is both a means to distribute content and a way of picking up contextual advertising, for marketeers like Rok Hrastnik is a way of reaching a customer without undergoing the spam filters that block so much email content. Others have grander visions: for Dave Sifry of blog-monitors Technorati it is the beginning of an Internet that is not composed of destination websites, but of ever-flowing structured content – the World Live Web. Blogger Ben Barrenputs it simply: “It is the most important development since the browser”.

Rok Hrastnik is back in his native Slovenia from attending a conference – Syndicate – in New York, where he has been talking about RSS. There were 300 people there – not bad. But even six years after the standard was invented by Netscape and then adapted for open source development it is still early days for RSS. Only a few corporate bods have got the point of it. Last August New York bankers Morgan Stanley took on an RSS expert. Because RSS has potential to disrupt the way any structured information is distributed online.

Birth of the RSS market

In the UK its use has reached most publishers, but a recent survey by Market Sentinel showed that corporate adoption is still slow. Only one of the FTSE100 companies is using a feed to distribute its news. None has launched a blog.

For the first few years of its existence RSS was mainly used by technical publishers, intermediaries like the pioneering news syndicators Moreover and the writers of weblogs “bloggers”, but – as the blogging phenomenon has spread and become mainstream (according to Blogpulse one million new blogs are now created every 17 days) – the technology has now been adopted by commercial information providers.

Commercial and marketing magnet

Henry H. Harteveldt of Forrester Research recently showed how travel agents are syndicating their special offers throughout the web. The response was so lively he is rushing out a follow-up. Harteveldt comments: “Travel firms should care about RSS because it can help them reach the next generation of travellers” with relevant, timely content. Alexandra White, Director of the UK’s Association of Online Publishers echoes this: “for most of our members it’s a no-brainer. The only issue is that if RSS is replacing email as a means of reaching the customer, what happens to the advertising that funded the email newsletter?”

Marketers love RSS because it by-passes the tangle of commercial email, with its spam filtering, its bounced mails, its black-listed ISPs, its cluttered inboxes, and replaces it with a simple elegant model where the content is picked up by the user at their convenience and only when it becomes available. “It has the potential to shift web traffic from the World Wide Web to feedreaders,” Rok Hrastnik comments. And that creates another challenge for publishers...

Your brand in the "river of news"

What if the reader doesn’t visit your site and accesses your content through a desktop feed reader like Newsgator or an online aggregator like Bloglines? They may read your valuable content without giving you the page impressions for your advertising revenues. It’s a threat that worries the Guardian’s Simon Waldman, who has identified the repurposing of that newspaper’s content within aggregators as a threat both to revenues and to editorial integrity:

The prioritisation, structure and design that we have given to our content in our papers – and on our websites - is lost as we all become just one feed among many

To recapture the lost revenues, the answer can be to include advertising items in the feed itself. Often these are given a different style to editorial items. Sabrina Dent hates this: “RSS users aren’t ready for it, yet. We think it mitigates the effectiveness of our content”.

Big players moving in

Nevertheless many regard this as the obvious business model for RSS. It appeals to Rupert Murdoch, who directed his people towards RSS in a recent speech to his editors. Because RSS summarises and aggregates content it concentrates eyeballs and that means advertising revenues. Murdoch quoted Bill Gates’ comment that the web will generate $30bn a year in advertising revenues by 2008. Murdoch even hinted that his media properties should start working with bloggers, finding ways of linking them into his bigger media properties. It’s a model already piloted by the French newspapers Le Monde and Libération in their online versions.

Nigel Pocklington of the FT points out that the transition from off-line to online newspaper advertising is already tough enough. “Whereas we may get £90,000 for a full colour page in the newspaper on a good day, on the web, the cost per thousand is a lot lower...” The deep linking encouraged by RSS feeds means that the reader no longer enters the site by the homepage, and that means advertising is harder to deliver. Nonetheless, Pocklington observes that the FT’s RSS traffic is doubling every month.

Commercial models being floated

Sabrina Dent agrees that advertising is the key to the industry, but points out that current advertising models are pretty simple. In a Mink Media blog, the publishers either include content about the advertiser (“advertorial”) or provide a contextual feed. For example Mink Media’s travel site Wanda Lust has carried a feed from their Hotel booking partner’s top 5 hotels, together with pictures.

Pheedo in the US has built a business model putting advertising into RSS feeds, and in the hosted solution reports click-throughs, while Feedburner offers statistics and contextual advertising.

That contextual advertising is being provided by a familiar household name - for now even the biggest of big guns is moving into position. In the last couple of weeks Google has started trialling a beta product which puts advertisements into an RSS feed, using its AdSense programme. The adverts are chosen to be relevant to the topic of the feed and appear in boxed graphics in the feedreader. “The only snag is that for your feeds to get any revenue from AdSense the volumes need to be huge,” Sabrina Dent says. “If your blog isn’t in the top twenty, forget it.”

About the Author:

Mark Rogers is CEO of Market Sentinel who monitor blogs and message boards on behalf of corporate clients and advise companies on how to make their voices heard in the "blogosphere". Mark was a co-founding commissioning editor of BBC Online and co-founder of Amazon's multi-platform shopping service Amazon.com Anywhere. Market Sentinel CTO Ian Davis was co-founder of Calaba (now Surf Kitchen), and pioneered and co-wrote XML news syndication standards.