What An RSS Feed Reveals About Its Subscriber

RSS, it’s one of many ways to syndicate your content, and a Web feature that’s all but commonplace these days.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, November 10, 2008

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RSS, it’s one of many ways to syndicate your content, and a Web feature that’s all but commonplace these days. However, have you ever thought about what an RSS feed can tell you about your audience? Bill Flitter, CEO of Pheedo, a company that connects publishers with advertisers via their RSS feeds, spoke with Audience Development and offered these soundbites on the insights RSS can reveal about its subscriber.

An Emotional Connection

“It’s the idea of the connection the user has with content. The nice thing about an RSS subscriber is that they’ve made a choice in how they want to receive that content and where they want to view that information. They have more of an emotional connection to that information. What that means from an advertiser perspective is that they’re reaching a user that is further down the relationship cycle because they’ve made a commitment to that publisher. That is a much stronger relationship than a user who just goes to a page and visits that Web site or comes from a Google search. All of those things have value, but there are different degrees of value.”

Why It’s Better than Behavior

“The Web is going toward more personalization, not just behavior, but more based on what I read and what I’m actually doing. Behavior targeting is based all on intent—the advertiser is trying to predict what I’m going to do tomorrow based on what I’ve done previously. Just because I’ve visited a golf Web site does that make me an enthusiast? No. I could have been buying something for a good friend of mine.

“And if you take a look at where things are going with the subscription model—especially with RSS—it’s really about context. I know what you’re going to do tomorrow because I know you’re going to open your feed. I know you’re going to click on X number of articles and then I know what those articles are going to be. So I can start to paint a much deeper picture of you. And it’s a deeper layer of commitment than even behavioral targeting is doing today.”