RSS FEEDS: Whither Thou Goest

I open up the Feed Reader every day on my laptop and cruise the news feeds I subscribe to. The amount of information is now overwhelming, I need to just subscribe to only the feeds that are of immediate interest, else I would be reading feeds twenty four hours every day.

When I click on a link to find out more about a news item, I am taken to a web page with the article of news on it, also there are banner ads, advertising icons to click on, and other side news items to click to take me elsewhere.

The potential for advertising on those web pages for interested marketers is great, not withstanding the change in the news article each day on that web page. One day it might be about Amazon and the outages they kept getting, or the next it could be a pending court case about cybersquatting a brand name. Whatever article is shown the advertisers get their message across. It may not be part of the advertising ploy to sell goods and services from that advert, but to brand their products, or name, for future sales.

One research company predicts internet advertising revenues will rise by 19% next year, they also predict that newspaper advertising will drop considerably.

Future habits of net cruisers will be to immediately open up the feeds and cruise all the latest news, in contrast to going for Google and Yahoo, inputting search terms, and then cruising only those web sites that come up. Please! Dont laugh, most of us still do this!

If a web site has not got its own news feed, it will not get any eyeballs.

Those interested in marketing to the masses should think about trying to get adverts placed on pages of those sites with a news feed, with their name, or web address written prominently, for cruisers to come and visit, but the main objective is to create branding.

The usage of search engines for locating web sites will decline, unthinkable at the moment for most internet users, but their rss feeds directories will be the most sought after to be able to access more feeds. So search engines will still survive, but usage habits will change.

The big-dogs in rss feeds update news on their feeds every fifteen minutes or so, they know that to keep a captive readership that they have to update frequently, or they will lose eyeballs to some other service thats giving out more frequent news. This is critical from an advertisers point of view who wants his ads showing on web pages with updated news as frequently as possible.

I can feel the nudging elbows already as advertisers are trying to get the best spots.

The most money to be gained from rss feeds is by the person who owns one, the advertising revenue from spots on the web pages the feed points to will be flooding in, and with the decline in effectiveness of newspaper advertising, the rss feeds are the only place most advertisers are going to spend their money. The younger tech-savvy 18-24 year olds dont buy newspapers, they also dont switch on the television as much anymore, so television advertisers are looking at rss feeds, especially the big media companies who have millions of ad dollars to spend.

Remember this, anybody, even you, can put up a rss feed.