Text Link Ads have just made available a new advertising format called Feedvertising — a new format that allows bloggers to run text link ads, sell in-house ads or affiliate programs.

Feedvertising lets publishers to display ads in their RSS feeds easily. Currently it supports WordPress 2.x bloggers but more blogging platforms are coming shortly.

For Advertisers

What could advertisers do? They can drill down on even the toughest target audience by selecting individual blog RSS feeds to advertise in.

Interested advertisers could browse top feedvertising packages from the marketplace — based on the top 25 Technorati ranks, browse by categories and search by keyword.

Feed Publishers, Especially Bloggers

Bloggers could use this to:

1. Promote your own products, services, or affiliate programs.
2. Sell ads by allowing TLA sell the space for you in their marketplace.

Feed publishers don’t have to worry about advertisements in their feeds because they could make them as unobtrusive as possible by displaying only text links and tagging the line with Advertisements or Sponsored By.

Pricing

TLA allows flat rate pricing, not based on page views (CPM) or cost-per-click (CPC). According to them, it is about “cost-per-influence” and reaching your target audience.

Running ads on Personal Development site owned by Steve Pavlina costs $525.00 per month while on Professional Blogging Tips site by Darren Rowse costs $250.00, although the former ranks 101 while the latter currently secure the 70th position in Technorati.

The Future

For now, it might still be too early to show results from this program. However, allowing advertisers to reach very focused feed readers is something many marketers should pay close attention to. The cost is considered affordable even for low budget business.

For bloggers, this is yet another way to monetize and generate revenue from what could be mostly untouched space for most blog publishers: RSS feeds. Although RSS advertising itself is nothing new, Feedvertising should give both advertisers and publishers an organized way to move the ad medium forward.

Six Apart acquires Rojo Networks

Six Apart, blogging software and service company, has acquired RSS newsreader Rojo Networks. No terms were disclosed but it was estimated that the deal is less than $5 million. They are going to take Rojo’s RSS infrastructure and build it into Vox and Livejournal.

A peek inside TechCrunch’s 100k subscriber milestone

TechCrunch’s RSS subscribers, which comprise 0.47% of the total FeedBurner subscribers, is being covered on FeedBurner blog.

In the post, FeedBurner tries to explain the trend and history of RSS feed subscription. It is a bit of tooting their own horn, but basically they are right. The service is that useful that we can’t just use web server access log to get the appropriate stats.

Internet Retailer has an article about the use of RSS among online retailers. Like many other RSS evangelists, Ryan DeLuca, CEO of Bodybuilding.com predicted that next year the growth of RSS feeds is going to be explosive.

“The next version of Microsoft Office will have RSS functionality, and the new Internet Explorer 7 has a built-in RSS reader,” he says. “These kinds of developments will make RSS much easier for the average web user and take the technology to the next level. The whole idea of the Internet is finding things you want, not someone giving you things they think you need. It’s like TiVo: Give me what I want and let me skip over the other stuff.”

Here is a tip or advice for internet retailers from DeLuca. He said that people subscribe to RSS for content, not coupon or specials. Once you develop that relationship, you can weave in occasional coupons and specials.

While I believe some retailers could use coupon and special feeds successfully, the idea is great for the rest. It certainly makes sense. If visitors don’t trust you to buy something from your site/online store, they won’t have the urge to subscribe to your feed, especially if that only contains coupons and special offers.

Building relationship through carefully designed content strategy is important. A separate feed for coupons never hurt though because as people begin to trust you, they would possibly want a more focused feed much more than occasional coupons in content feed.

[Internet Retailer]

The SimplyHeadlines.com, now in experimental mode, is a new RSS-based service that will turn your favorite feeds into newspaper format. You can choose morning or evening edition of the newspaper. The digest will be delivered by email every day.

Another neat feature is the ability to convert content into simple text, Blackberry friendly version for consumption on handheld devices.

SimplyHeadlines sends a once a day email newspaper, which includes many options you can choose from:

• Where your headlines come from
• How many there will be
• At what time of day they will arrive
• The order in which they will appear

Well, for information freak this may not be a useful service especially if you monitor hundreds of separate feeds daily.

But at least, I’d imagine this could help new RSS users to start receiving topical information from various sources in a more convenient manner compared to manually visiting the news sources one by one.

[SimpleHeadlines]

Research showed that merely 2% of US employees subscribe to RSS feeds, and only 9% know what such feeds are. These numbers might be a bit disappointing, but please realize the fact that RSS is a simple and transparent technology that you — as an end-user — don’t have to know that to take advantage of it.

Internet marketers are certainly eager to use it for different applications such as podcasting, syndication of blog and site content, and also as an end run around spam filters.

According to BtoB magazine, 8% of US email marketers used RSS as of June 2006. The low actual usage by email marketers belies more widespread interest in the technology.

A separate study found that nearly a third (32%) of US marketers were either interested of very interested in advertising via RSS though.

Perhaps the RSS community could learn something from podcasting. Podcasting uses exactly the same RSS technology — with enclosures. It leaped beyond what marketers expected when iTunes 4.9 was released with podcast integration.

Now anyone who uses the software don’t have to know what the technology is, they could just use the software to subscribe and download to podcast shows they are interested in.

The integration of podcatching software into iTunes is key.

In future version of Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS operating systems, we could expect better integration with RSS.

As a marketer, I can’t wait the time to see that happens before our very eyes.

[eMarketer]