The new Pheed Read Spring 2006 (May 2006) shows that the average CTR of a standalone RSS ad is 2.76 percent, down from 7.99 percent in December 2005. The average CTR of an inline RSS ad is 0.45 percent, down from 0.85 percent. These rates dropped 65 percent and 47 percent, respectively. The ad CTR will continue to normalize but much less significant into the next quarter.

The study looks at RSS ad and content CTR and how those rates are affected by ad position, frequency, feed content category, and best feed reading day.

Summary feeds yield a 12 percent average CTR, while full text feeds only record 10 percent CTR. A better measure is probably median CTR, which is 8 percent for summary feeds and 10 percent for full text feed.

The majority of readers, a full 90 percent, choose to read the feed content in the RSS reader environment, regardless they are viewing full or partial feeds. BlogLines is still the most popular feed reader, getting 30 percent share.

On the content category and vertical market side, the top three performing content categories for RSS advertising are:

• Comics & humor - 9.62 percent
• Travel - 8.54 percent
• Kids & family - 7.61 percent

When it comes to frequency, placing ads in every yields the best results. Not only does this approach ensure maximum advertising exposure but it also yields the highest click-through rate of any ad placement frequency.

Ads in every post gets an average CTR of 1.75 percent, compared with previous data of 1.04 percent CTR.

Pheedo used a sample size of 50 feeds in this study, of which 84 percent of the feeds were summary feeds.

Source: Pheedo.

FeedBurner, the largest and my favorite RSS management service, has launched FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN). Over the years FeedBurner has provided its users (feed publishers) with the tools to better manage and track their feeds.

Currently media is priced on a CPM basis, and ads are targeted by content channel. FeedBurner now has 8 million aggregate subscribers and growing at 10 percent a month.

Advertisers have the options to run ads in the following ad units:

• Floating right indent: 480 x 60
• Full landscape: 480 x 60
• Medium rectangle: 300 x 250

Text format is allowed for the first two, while GIF and JPEG image format is available for medium rectangle ad format.

FeedBurner is selling the ads in the following channels:

• Arts & Entertainment
• Automotive
• Business
• Computing & Technology
• Consumer Electronics
• Current Affairs & Politics
• Digital Culture
• Health & Wellness
• News & Information
• PC & Console Games
• Sports & Recreation
• Travel
• International (currently Spanish and Dutch Languages)

Link: FeedBurner Ad Network.

Pluck, the company behind BlogBurst, has signed several new publishers for its blog syndication service. The publishers include San Jose Mercury News, which will syndicate tech content from various blogs.

Another publisher worth mentioning is Parade magazine and Lee Enterprises, which publishes 58 daily newspapers in small markets.

Pluck has just launched the blog syndication network out of beta earlier this month. They now have 1500 bloggers in the network. The company offer depth of content and breadth of choice so publishers have more to choose from.

Publishers can choose from JavaScript, robust SOAP or XML APIs to integrate content from BlogBurst network. Blogs who want to participate have to publish their feed in full text.

Source: MediaPost Publications.
Reference: BlogBurst to Syndicate Your Content?

eBay has adopted RSS for some time. Members are able to monitor announcement and discussion board, and listings from Stores. Now at last, they have added support to enable RSS feeds for search terms. With this enhancement, users can create a custom RSS feed that will deliver the results of their search.

Users who are interested in the search results (and future search results) can subscribe to the RSS 2.0 feeds using the feed reader of their choice.

Now that is information consumption on steroid.

eBay buyers and sellers can now access customized product results they want without having to manually enter the search term every time. Look for an orange RSS button for a link to the feed. The product will be displayed as they become available.

David A. Utter of WebProNews writes that eBay have already acknowledged some issues with this new feature:

Since many readers cache information and poll at most every 30 minutes, listings that appear on the RSS feed will not have an end time less than 15 minutes from the moment the feed was retrieved. Therefore, if your reader requests the feed now, the first item will end in at least 15 minutes.

Initially this feature will not support all search parameters available through Advanced Search pages. In the next few days we will include on this page a full list of unsupported filters.

The information provided in the RSS include:

• Buy It Now price
• Current auction price
• Listing end time
• Number of bids
• Listing format or auction type
• Listing category
• Link to the item’s page

Sources: eBay announcement, WebProNews.

The Moonwatcher blog has a verbatim copy of email between Charlie Wood and Sean Lyndersay from Microsoft regarding support for secure feed in Windows RSS platform. Microsoft decided not to support authenticated feeds in the new Windows RSS Platform.

The feature is critical for adoption of RSS among enterprises. I am afraid they have to wait until the next release of Windows.

Microsoft Windows supports NTLM/Kerberos pass-through for using the users logged-in credentials and SSL-encrypted feeds though.

They also found that many people who want authenticated feeds feature actually want personalized feeds and in turn recommend implementing them where possible.

Read the entire post for full email.

Source: Moonwatcher.