Earlier this week I was able to catch up with the CEO/Founder of Pheedo, Bill Flitter, to get his thoughts on RSS, Advertising within RSS, best practices for feeds and how to leverage Pheedo in relation to RSS. Here's how our conversation went:

[Manoj]: Can you start by giving me some background on yourself

[Bill]: I am the founder and CEO of Pheedo and a serial entrepreneur. Prior to Pheedo, I founded Email Shopping Network and directed its sales and marketing activities until its acquisition by eUniverse in 2002. I enjoy helping early stage companies navigate the start-up phase and have helped many start-ups develop innovative products and services. It is a true passion.

My father was an entrepreneur so I get that spirit from him. I grew up on the largest dairy farm in WI in the 70s. My dad was the last of the farmers in the Flitter family and I am first of the Flitters making their stake on a new crop of land online. So, I don’t look at myself as a typical Silicon Valley CEO. My Midwestern background gives me the advantage of looking at the World differently.

When I am not working, my family is my focus. It brings me great joy coaching my son’s t-ball team or chasing my daughter around the yard.

[Manoj]: Why should an organization leverage RSS?

[Bill]: RSS has gone under the radar since its mass introduction in 2005. It’s often surprising to people the actual volume of content consumed via RSS.

According to a recent study from Universal McCann, RSS use is exploding, growing faster than all other key social media platforms, including social networking and video sharing. According to the study, the number of RSS users jumped 153% between June 2007 and March 2008.

Additional stats to consider

• 56% of online consumers use RSS feeds, although only 19% knowingly subscribed to them
• 60% of RSS users read them at least once a week and actively customize their start pages using RSS feeds and other widgets

[Manoj]: Why is RSS such a hot topic again?

[Bill]: Aggregation is really the hot topic. Much of what makes aggregation happen is RSS. One contributing factor is the growth of facebook. Facebook has made aggregation available to the masses. They make it really easy for me to aggregate my friends’ activities and pull in content from other sources. They don’t call it RSS, but RSS is behind the scenes on many social media applications doing the heavy lifting.

Additionally, you cannot ignore the growth of start-pages like Netvibes or lifestreaming applications like Friendfeed. All these services are making it easy to aggregate content to create a custom content experience.

RSS is giving people the freedom to create their own content consumption experience. They can snack from various content sources streaming into whatever environment they want.

It might mean the end of the homepage. However, RSS is like search. It has the ability to drive users deep into a site while bypassing the homepage.

[Manoj]: Do you have any tips or best practices for getting the most out of RSS (subscribers, setup, etc...)

[Bill]: We strongly believe in creating active subscribers. Sounds obvious, right? However, the standard measure to date has been around how many subscribers you have to your feed. Your goal as a publisher should be placed on how to create active users. As the uptake in RSS skyrockets, Publishers will be forced to create a revenue stream from content leaving their site. Active subscribers create impressions and impressions create revenue.

My advice is this. Focus on the creating active subscribers

1. Study when users are most engaged with you content and deliver your feeds at that precise moment. Understand what they are reading and deliver more of that, measure, measure, measure.
2. Give users more to do with your feed content than just click through. You never know your reader’s frame of mind at the time they are reading your content in a feed. So give them options to email to a friend, bookmark, search for more on the topic, etc, anything that will keep users engaged with your feed content.
3. And the obvious, create great original content. If you are a publisher or an advertiser, creating compelling content is they key to enjoying the benefits of highly-engaged users.

Bonus: If you are a publisher, have a revenue strategy thought-out before scaling your feeds.

[Manoj]: Why is RSS a good option for advertising?

[Bill]: RSS represents the most loyal engaged users of a publisher’s content. They have opted in to receive content and chosen to stay connected to a specific publisher.

1. Active users: consume 20 feeds on average, visit their feed reader 3 times per day and stay for 20 minutes each session.
2. Opt-in medium: RSS provides a much-needed supplement to email. SPAM, phishing and federal laws have made customer communications and marketing via email very difficult for companies, even when the customer has opted-in to the content. RSS is, in many ways, a clean channel and it gives the consumer complete control over the content they receive.
3. Effective. RSS is a hybrid of online advertising, newsletter sponsorships, and content syndication, RSS advertising shows great promise of being a highly effective, targeted vehicle for driving traffic and leads from an audience that is influential, active online, and responsive. Our high-repeat returning advertiser rate is the key indictor if RSS is effective.

[Manoj]: Can you explain how Pheedo fits in?

[Bill]: Our mission has stayed the same since 2005 - to create new kinds of profit driven advertising services through syndicated content, like RSS, for our premium publishers and advertisers. Pheedo delivers revenue and analytics to premium publishers of syndicated content while providing a brand safe environment to advertisers.

Pheedo helps to unravel the mystery behind RSS. It provides premium publishers with insight into how their RSS content is performing, delivers a better picture of the ROI of feed content, and ultimately aids in the growth of the feeds. Pheedo’s breadth of premium publisher categories helps advertisers specifically reach the audience that will generate the highest rate of quality clicks and achieve the highest ROI on their ad spend.

Labels: RSS

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