Interesting … and not really surprising … but useful. As reported by Online Media Daily, a new study shows that ads in RSS feeds work best (in terms of click-throughs) when the ads are individual items, rather than as ad text tacked on to an item.
Advertising on RSS feeds is still pretty new, so the industry is
feeling its way. Early experiments by news publishers often added a
line of ad text to selected news items, which is visible in the user’s
RSS reader. Others tried the concept of inserting occasional items that
were purely ads — so as you’re reading down a list of news items,
occasionally one would be an ad.
It makes sense that individual items as ads would perform best. If the
implementation is that people are “tricked” into thinking that an ad
headline is a news story, however, then those initial clicks of course
will dwindle and there will be a lot of annoyed users. Proper technique
if you’re going to go the individual-item-as-ad route for RSS is to make it
clear that the RSS link is an ad.
Google does this with its WebClips RSS newsfeed features on its Gmail service (which I mentioned yesterday). When an “ad” appears instead of a news headline in WebClips,
the text says “Sponsored link.” (However, that link on WebClips is far
to the right of the ad headline; I think that’s edging toward fooling
people into thinking that ad text is a headline.)
CLARIFICATION: I’ve written a follow-up item about this, which questions the validity of the study mentioned in this item.
