Ready for Syndication Soon?

RSS may stand for “Really Simple Syndication” (among other, less descriptive things), but there’s still nothing simple about selling the automated Web feed processes to either Web publishers or advertisers.

It’s true that only a small portion of the Web user audience—about 5%-- knowingly subscribes to an RSS content feed. But the stripped-down delivery technology taps into enough current trends that its proponents are hoping 2007 will see a large uptick in RSS use. People are time-pressed, bombarded with content and growing impatient even with search that returns lots of irrelevant results along with the information they want.

In that atmosphere, users should be ready for a platform that offers to notify them of changes in their favorite Web content in real time. And the more accustomed they are to subscribing to Web feeds, the thinking goes, the more likely they’ll be to allow trusted marketers to reach them via RSS—as long as there’s enough value in it for them

The launch of the Internet Explorer 7 browser could be one crucial tipping point that helps foster RSS. IE7, currently in beta, puts an interactive RSS feed discovery button right at the top of the browser and opens content in the “Favorites” menu, so users don’t even have to set up even a simple aggregator account. IE7 also opens feed content in a format that doesn’t include all that scary-looking (and off-putting) XML code.

Web publishers are positioning themselves to take advantage of an easier, less geeky RSS. LendingTree.com, the online mortgage loan marketplace, went through a Web site re-design earlier this year and as an important part of that made sure to offer its plentiful finance-related content via RSS to interested users.

“We have a large bank of content on credit, home loans and home buying and other topics, and we’re adding to it continually,” says Bridget Smith, senior education marketing manager for LendingTree.com. “So as part of our new content management system, we asked to have RSS included in the platform.” FeedBurner is distributing LendingTree’s content, which is augmented monthly, although not on a regular schedule.

While the content could be delivered via e-mail or newsletter, Smith says, those channels involve some delivery uncertainty, especially since LendingTree.com’s mailing list includes a good proportion of work addresses, where spam filtering may be more rigorous.

“RSS is more consumer-friendly, in they subscribe to the feed and have complete control over unsubscribing,” she says. “And we’re actually able to segment the subscriber population more effectively because they explicitly sign up for separate RSS feeds. LendingTree.com currently offers 25 or 30 different feeds on home loans, car and home buying, credit practices and other general informational topics.

“We try to be ahead of the curve in terms of content distribution,” says Rob Lenderman, LendingTree’s SEO architect. “We’ve been testing with the new browsers and found they totally work with our changes. That should help move people toward agreeing to being pushed the data they want, rather than having to go pull the data or to sign up for e-mail, with all the concerns about spam.”

And it’s this segmentation of content feed that will in turn allow marketers to target RSS users. “Right now almost everyone offers one feed on their site, and we all get the same one,” says Bill Flitter, founder and marketing vice president of RSS network and solution provider Pheedo. “In the next phase, I start sub-categorizing my content or add some unique identifiers. This will be a natural progression for RSS.”

That segmentation is beginning to take hold at the advertising end of RSS. In October, Pheedo rolled out a geotargetng capability on its RSS ad network. Using IP address mapping, Pheedo can let marketers target specific geographic areas in the U.S., the U.K. and some 200 other countries.

Net Communities Ltd. specializes in selling online advertising space in the U.K., mostly to advertisers in the technology space and mostly repping Web properties from the U.S. and Canada. “We partnered with Pheedo because the technology industry has taken very quickly to RSS,” says Andy Evans, founder and managing director.

So far, Pheedo and Net Communities have collaborated on test campaigns focused on the U.K. alone, both for lead generation and to drive traffic to Web sites. But when they have a few case studies under their belt, “we’ll be rolling out into Europe as well, where possible,” Evans says.

Direct marketers who work with affiliate networks should be rooting for RSS to take off, Flitter points out, because it will get their product content out faster and with less effort. “From a cataloger perspective, if I can syndicate a feed out to affiliate sites, then any time I update my catalog, the data is automatically updated on those pages,” he says. “I don’t have to send them new creative every time, and I can play with prices and offers to see what’s best at driving visitors back to my site.”

When will RSS feeds offer those capabilities? “Talk to me later in ’07,” Flitter laughs.