conditional GET

Hopefully in the discussion about RSS scaling issues, everyone can remember that conditional GET is a really useful way to reduce the load.

cost per influence

Interesting Corante discussion of a "cost per influence" metric for blog advertising. It might be a bit early for this but its certainly an idea worth exploring. One item in there I agree with 100% is that Google AdWords is commoditizing CPC. But remember: people make good money from commodities.

amen

Steve Gillmor has it right:

there's absolutely no reason why advertising won't work in RSS

...can't argue with that ;)

no download counts

Jeff Jarvis is correct in comments responding to my last post, pointing out:

Nonetheless, we need to be able to beat down the argument that the RSS aggregator downloaded the feed, say, once an hour and nobody ever saw it. If the gif is displayed, at least it can be said that the reader called it up in the aggregator.

Of course this is true and download counts in RSS are pretty much meaningless since aggregators download RSS files at pre-scheduled intervals. What this means is that RSS ad sales can't effectively use the "page served" model of CPM because unlike the web, every RSS content item is requested by the user.

I'd go a step further and point out that users downloading and caching your website content make ad serving have to necessarily focus on either brand-driven inserts as a currency, or clickthroughs. Page view counting with invisible GIFs is something RSSAds will do, so item views that occur when a user's PC is online can be counted. But for offline aggregators like FeedDemon, a user's laptop can view the content without the user being online. For instance, I bring my laptop with aggregator on planes so I can read websites. Those views can't be counted unless the aggregator saved the views and posted them to the ad server later on. Aggregators might start to provide some data to RSS servers to solve this problem.

Jeff Jarvis on RSS advertising

Jeff Jarvis makes a lot of interesting points here on advertising in RSS. One thing I would slightly disagree with is that RSS needs a reliable way to count views. Yes this is useful. However I would argue that its almost impossible to TRULY count this. This is because user attention is impossible to count, unless there is a clickthrough or an action. The user could scroll past an RSS item they don't view as interesting, and the aggregator might count that as a view. What I think will work is interesting content coupled with interesting and relevant (for the feed) ads. Metrics are useful but advertisers will ultimately count success in the click-throughs and in their ability to create a connection with the readers of a a feed.

are ads in RSS bad?

Dave Winer thinks that ads in RSS aren't interesting. I'd agree, to a point that there is nothing new - but ads in RSS will still be an important revenue stream for content publishers, just as banner ads, google AdWords, etc. have helped finance content users access via the web.