RSS advertising

Jeremy Zawodny's notes from Web 2.0 are pretty interesting. Especially is the commentary on the Yahoo! Search Blog about the future of RSS advertising.

While I expected to hear some discussion of RSS advertising and feed monetization, I was really surprised. RSS advertising talk was everywhere.

This really goes to show how quickly things can change in the on-line world. Two years ago RSS was still under the radar for most publishers. One year ago nobody was talking about advertising in RSS feeds. They were often just headlines and excerpts--teaser content used to get traffic back to your site. But with RSS really gaining steam this year, everyone's looking for ways to work ads into feeds. Keep an eye on this one. I expect to see a lot of rapid innovation in the next year from all over the industry. Entirely new companies have already popped up in this market. And at this point the technology, the business model, and even the ad formats are up for grabs right now.

The challenge with RSS advertising is that it is highly targeted, but one of the benefits of RSS is that it doesn't have ads in the first place. If there will be ads, there's no way big banners or skyscrapers will work. It will have to be something akin to Google's Adsense, i.e. text-based and simple. I wouldn't stand for anything more intrusive.

Then, Jason Calcanis reports that Dan Rosensweig, COO of Yahoo! announced that Yahoo! will be using Overture to serve ads in their RSS feeds.

Yahoo to launch Overture ads in RSS!!! - The Nanopublishing Weblog

That may seem like a small step forward, and it is, but it is an important one, because it will help spur the growth of RSS in general.

Lots more info on Web 2.0 is at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 site.