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The Impact of RSS Outside the Aggregator

Let’s step back for a minute and take a look at RSS. When we look at the core of RSS, what does it really do? The answer to this question is simple…RSS moves content.

RSS is not only about getting news and blog updates in your RSS aggregator, though that is one of the great uses of RSS. It’s bigger than that. RSS is for gathering, sending, relocating, syndicating and updating content to make it relevant and customized to fulfill your needs - no rules, standard applications or limits on what it can do, RSS is a backbone technology for moving and updating content, making the options of what can be done with the technology nearly unlimited from a marketing perspective.

2007 will be THE year of RSS, as I have been saying now for a while, and I’m not the only one, but the explosion won’t come from people simply adopting the practice of reading feeds in their RSS aggregators. It will come from innovation with RSS in a variety of online markets - using it to do new things and improve old online practices. We need to start thinking about RSS outside the traditional aggregator and start exploring the many ways it can revolutionize the online marketplace. Here are two examples:

Just in the past few weeks, there have been some interesting adoptions of innovative uses of RSS. Reuters will use Pluck’s BlogBurst product to bring relevant blog content to Reuters’ online news properties allowing bloggers to have a voice in the news. How is the blog content delivered? RSS of course.

Another great example of an outside-the-aggregator use of RSS is in the new AIM 6.0 which updates users when their buddies have uploaded content to the web. When your friends’ videos have been added to YouTube or pictures added to Flickr (among many others services), AIM users receive updates, via RSS, of the new content.

In both of these examples, RSS is used as a method of transport, a way of getting content from one place to another and always keeping it updated. Believe it or not, this has not always been easy to do, and RSS is the first technology to simplify this process in a scalable manner.

From an RSS marketing perspective, ads in RSS feeds have been around for a while now and provide a great way for publishers to monetize their RSS content and for advertisers to reach a very targeted audience. But this is just the beginning. The real innovation in RSS marketing will come in the form of people using RSS to power online advertising - on-site, in feeds and even offline (Times Square perhaps?) - Feed powered ads.

Marketers are always looking for ways to make their marketing creative and methods of targeting consumers as relevant as possible. Using RSS to power ad creative keeps the ad fresh because it is automatically updated with the new feed content with little or no effort required from a human. Feed powered ads can also be associated with any feeds you choose, allowing for specific content to be fed to different sites based on the content and demographic of the site. The result of these capabilities is highly relevant advertising with updated content that consumers can act upon. Up to the minute content in ads gives marketers a whole new way of targeting potential customers and it will be interesting to see how people begin to innovate with it.

A few companies have actually taken stabs at it, but feed powered ads are in there infancy and will grow and be developed to do great things and really revolutionize online marketing.

Keep an eye out for some cool new products, ad units and even new companies forming based on this concept. It’s proving to be the start of a new micro-economy. But unlike feeds in an aggregator, RSS feeds will now be in the background as the engine doing all the work. I see it as the “Intel Inside” of the Internet. You don’t see the dual-core Pentium processor, but it’s powering everything you do on your computer. Same will go for RSS on the Internet - it will power much of what people do online as it works quietly (but hard) in the background.

Who knows, maybe one day, just like the “Intel Inside” sticker on your computer, the billboard you drive by every morning with the digital ads that change on the fly will have a little sign in the corner reading “Powered by RSS.”

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