Archive for December, 2005

RSS: Advice for Sponsor Programs

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

If you want affiliates to send you traffic:

RSS comes into play as the mechanism through which Syndicators will deliver content to Afiliates, and through which Affiliates will communicate with each other and Syndicate Forward.

While it is already commonly understood and expected that sponsor programs will give you tools and content to help you promote them, the tipping point in that relationship is definitely shifting in favor of the traffic sender.

Here again, RSS comes into the picture, as Sponsors/Syndicators pump billions into affliate acquisition marketing. Production costs rise with audience market share. And audiences are notoriously fickle. This is exactly like broadcast television, during its sponsored hey-day, with a few very important differences… more

RSS Pudding and Proof

Tuesday, December 20th, 2005

rss feeds

Pheedo, the RSS advertising and analytics experts, released its second in a series of “Pheed Read” reports, providing RSS publishers, advertisers and users insight into RSS usage patterns. The complete “Pheed Read” report is available on Pheedo’s blog.

The following conclusions and analysis are based on traffic during Fall 2005.

Study findings include:

Standalone RSS ads are far more successful than inline ads. A standalone RSS ad (the entire post is the advertisement) generates, on average, a 7.99% click-through rate (CTR) — over nine times more clicks than an inline RSS ad (an advertisement within a publisher’s post).

Placing RSS ads in every other post yields the highest percentage of click throughs. When ads are placed in every other feed post, users clicked on the ad 3.24% of the time. This is over three times more effective than placing an advertisement in every post in a feed, where the CTR is 1.04%.

RSS ads are outperforming similar Web ads. With traditional and rich-media online ads garnering CTR ranging from .20% to 1.17% CTR, according to a report by DoubleClick, standalone RSS ads, with an average CTR of 7.99%, are outperforming traditional online ads by a wide margin…more

Talking to the Spider

Monday, December 19th, 2005

the spider talks

quoting the spider

I realized that the Spider was — in spite of having been on the job for a number of years — still largely ignorant of the things we want it (that Sergey and Larry must want it) to know. And, given that, the problem reduces to “How to teach the Spider” — and teach the Spider is exactly what all of you must do on your pages and sites.

Let me explain how and why using RSS feeds does that much better than even 100% original content of the highest quality.

The Spider’s intelligence is, unlike our own, entirely relational. It can only compare the current data set to “history” and act on it according to instructions. Its inferential capabilities are very limited. For that reason, the fastest way to teach it is not by introducing it to things it has never encountered (though I did do that a few times — lol), but by using what it already knows as a basis, and as much of that as possible, and adding only a tiny amount of novelty…more

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