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.