In this interview, Stuart Watson shares a simple to follow step-by-step plan on how to start measuring RSS and then based on these metrics improve marketing and publishing performance. Some of the topics covered include lead generation, RSS metrics on the aggregate level, average daily readership for feed content and podcasting.

Dick Costolo shows concrete aggregate metrics based on Feedburner publishers (60,000 publishers). Some of the facts:

• 5% a week growth of managed feeds.
• Existing feeds are growing at 5% weekly.
• Some feeds has over half a million RSS subscribers.
• Listener growth for podcasting is growing.
• Clicks (feed-to-site) in relative numbers are falling.

Listen to the full interview in WMA and MP3 format at Marketing Studies.

Rok Hrasnik of Marketing Studies has posted part 2 of an audio interview with Dick Costolo (FeedBurner) and Stuart Watson (Syndicate IQ) about RSS metrics focus, RSS advertising and specific RSS measurements.

Some of the goodies you’ll find in this interview include:

• What is Feedburner learning from RSS advertising, especially since implementing Google AdSense?
• What metrics will advertisers be interested in with RSS?
• Is there a place for branding ads in RSS feeds?
• Are full-text feeds with ads in combination with summary feeds without the ads the answer to satisfy all subscribers? What will the market decide?

Listen to the 27:23 minutes interview in both WMA and MP3 format at The RSS Diary.

Marketing Sherpa has just published a test conducted by Citrix Systems Inc’s marketers regarding RSS and podcast advertising for GoToMeeting product. The team launched tests in March across a variety of RSS ad networks.

Five steps involved in the campaign:

1. Media buying for RSS
2. Creative for RSS
3. Integrated RSS + blog campaigns
4. Podcasting sponsorship experiment
5. Tracking response based on common metric

There are sample of creatives available for both the RSS and podcast campaigns. The results were enough to confirm them to continue doing the tests. Both of the advertising channel leveled out about the same metrics as more established media including search.

Here is a summary of the article:

Although intrigued, mainstream advertisers are for the most part staying away from RSS ads. The problem (just as with any emerging media buy) is reach. Tests aren’t worth the work unless you have a significant population to roll your campaign out to if the test wins.

However, now that Google’s started putting AdSense ads into RSS feeds, and major news sites such as USAToday.com and NYTimes.com are seeing double-digit monthly leaps in RSS-usership, we bet reach won’t be a problem by 2006.

Read the full article at Marketing Sherpa.

Based on the 18 months experience working with their publishers to monetize their feed content, Pheedo have proven to advertisers that RSS advertising works.

RSS is much different medium than other existing advertising channel such as email, web or search. If we are going to make RSS advertising works, there are tactics that are unique only to RSS.

Pheedo has put together a set of best practices for making RSS advertising an indispensable part of the marketing strategy:

1. Ads must fit the environment
2. Ads must be relevant and informative
3. Watch the content to ad ratio and unsubscribe rates
4. Tell, don’t sell: RSS ads are about creating relationships with readers
5. Be patient: Unlike e-mail, RSS feeds don”t demand to be read.

RSS is still young and evolving. There will be more tactics follow as many marketers take part in this exciting medium. If you are one of the early adopters, my best advice to subscribe to your own RSS feeds to have an idea about what your readers will see in your feeds.

As a FeedBurner user myself, I used to put Amazon ads on my RSS feed but after discovering that the ads are not relevant most of the time, I took them down. I seriously doubt there would be any conversion from those ads, let alone they could irritate my readers.

Full article at Pheedo.

Robin Good of Master New Media poined out two of his concerns with the adoption of RSS technology: advertising and security.

After testing Google AdSense in his main RSS feed for 5 days, he has some pretty amazing results: on 10,000 Google Ads impressions I have recorded three clicks and a revenue of 0.33 cents.

Nobody wrote to complain about the sudden appearance of ads in his RSS feeds (he didn’t announce the action publicly), but looking at the stats some of his readers unsubscribed altogether as a sign of protest.

Regarding to security, Richard Stiennon, director of threat research Webroot, one of the most popular anti-spyware vendors:

“…spyware will latch onto RSS (Real Simple Syndication) as a way to distribute ad- and spy-style software.”

“…by the end of the year spyware will probably have tripled in number, put Firefox in their sights and have turned RSS newsfeeds into key loggers and ad spawners.”

Another nasty possibility, said Stiennon, is that a vulnerability will be found in one of the big blogging services. “If a spyware writer finds a way to inject code into a blogging site — which could take the form of a SOAP object — most likely through a future vulnerability in Internet Explorer 7, then everyone who subscribes to that service’s blog RSS feeds is gonna get infected.” Such an attack could be massive, and because of the automated nature of RSS, extremely fast-acting.

As with any good technology, especially that which grows rapidly, there will be people trying to exploit and reveal vulnerabilities. Publishers should educate themselves and their audiences to better understand the threats and hopefully lessen the damage caused.

Read Robin’s concerns about RSS here.