Despite all of the issues with click fraud, pay-per-click advertising has largely been a boon for online marketing. It delivers a very precise way to target consumers at the exact moment they are "in market" for certain products and services. Now it's time for RSS to venture down a similar path.
Over the next several years, RSS use will skyrocket. It's going to become a much more seamless experience than it is today. The vast majority of users may never know what an RSS feed is or how it works, but they will slowly alter their online habits. As individuals, we have already evolved from surfers to searchers. As feeds become even more embedded and easy to use, we will become subscribers too.
When RSS adoption goes broad, it's going to generate all kinds of clickstream data on the sites that serve millions of feed subscribers. These platforms - which all of the big portals are pushing in different ways - will be able to take this rich aggregate data and use it to create innovative ways to target.
For example, what if Bloglines could identify for you the tech feeds have the most engaged subscribers? In other words, they could show you the feeds have not only the most subscribers but also the readers that actively click-through on embedded links. Bloglines then could create a special "tech deals" feed for an online retailer like Amazon and offer it to these subscribers to opt into. Or, they can turn themselves into an ad network and make it easy for marketers to buy across several feeds at once and then split the revenue with the Long Tail publishers.
All of this is the tip of the iceberg. What's clear to me, however, is that the feed aggregators have not monetized their platforms yet and you can bet this will happen really soon. When this occurs, RSS targeted advertising will take off just as it did with pay-per-click.
