Advertising potential from RSS feeds

RSS feeds provide a way of sharing your news with others.  It doesn’t matter which particular feeder they use, whether it’s Google, Yahoo or one of the many downloadable varieties, it serves as a hub to steadily stream news about your company. So rather than sending an email to those who are interested in your news, an RSS feed delivers it directly to them.

Like most companies, until recently newspapers provides an RSS feed with limited information – usually with a grabbing headline and the first few paragraphs of the story.  But The Guardian has decided to break the mould and offer the full version of the article through their RSS feed.

Why are they doing this?  Well it’s for completely altruistic reasons – what they see in their RSS feeds is the ability to advertise.  While the service is ad free at the moment you can guarantee in the near future there’ll be decorated with adverts, specifically targeted to individual interests, disguised in the form of subtitle text links.

The beauty of their idea is that it can be translated into any business that uses an RSS feed. Potentially we all have the ability to use it as a platform to sell advertising space or promote other areas of our business.  So not only can you inform your customers about what you’re up to via email marketing and your blog but also through your RSS feeds.