RSS Feeds are Quickly Becoming Mainstream

RSS feeds are quickly becoming mainstream, but publishers, advertisers and consumers are just scratching the surface. Recent data from the Pew Internet Research Foundation shows that a mere 9 percent of the Internet population has a good idea of what RSS is. Don't be
concerned about the numbers quite yet.

RSS is the new email newsletter RSS is poised to become an important content delivery mechanism in mainstream media. It will soon represent a permanent and fundamental change in the way information will be shared, viewed and acted upon online. It will reshape the way people interact with the web for several reasons.

1. E-mail SPAM has devastated the sending of legitimate customer
communication - RSS is "SPAM free"

2. Many publishers catering to the early adopter and tech markets are seeing 40% month-over-month growth rate in their RSS traffic. Some are seeing 50% of their traffic come from their RSS feed, with a corresponding decline in email subscriptions

3. RSS is easy-to-use (after the subscription process). Consumers will gravitate to anything that saves them time RSS was popularized by blogs

RSS has been around for awhile, but it hasn't been until very recently that there has been a surge in its use. Why now? I believe there are two reasons.

1. Explosion of blogs
2. Demand for consumer control

Technorati reports over 900,000 blog posts are created daily. Blog software tools make publishing to the web as simple as typing an email. RSS makes it easy to stay up-to-date with the volume of blog posts. The content comes to you. You no longer have to search for it.

A common misperception is you must have a blog to have an RSS feed. This is not so. RSS has been adopted by major publishers such as CNET, the BBC, Yahoo, Motley Fool, InfoWorld, The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Wired News, The Wall Street Journal and many
others, including a rapidly growing contingent of local and regional newspapers.

Era of Consumer Control

From TV and digital video recorders to Radio and Podcasts, consumers are demanding control over their media consumption. For over 50 years, TV and Radio has remained the same. With the advent and popularity of TiVo and Podcasting, both TV and Radio will see dramatic changes in how people interact with and consume these media. Consumers will watch and
listen on their time, skip commercials and create their own personal information gathering networks.

Because of RSS, online content consumption is changing too. You can now get your favorite content delivered right to your desktop and read it on your time - without the threat of SPAM clogging your inbox. In future posts, we'll explore how advertising will change in the era of consumer control.

RSS is in its Infancy. However, RSS is not perfect. It has a lot of growing up to do. Here are just a few things that will need to change before we see widespread adoption of RSS.

1. Subscribing to feeds is cumbersome. It is not intuitive
2. Receiving feeds requires another tool (news aggregator) to adopt
3. Getting subscriber counts and data requires new enterprise software to employ

Look where we are today with banners - animation, Flash, behavioral targeting, Fatboy Ad, affiliate programs etc.

In the future, RSS will carry more then text. Today, it is already the primary distribution channel for podcasts. In the near future, much of the content delivered in the era of the much touted Web 2.0 will come on the backs of RSS feeds.

Content provided by Jerry Hart, Hart Creative Marketing, Inc. and Bill Flitter Chief Marketing Officer at Pheedo.