RSS Feeds are all the rage nowadays. The number of users and subscribers of RSS feeds are said to be growing exponentially. Businesses and individuals are scrambling to get into the game. The question now on everyone’s mind is – “How do we now cash in on this new form of content?”
EContent Magazine in their March 2005 issue has a very interesting article on how businesses are looking to tap into the revenue potential of RSS feeds. As the article says,
“Where there are eyeballs, there must be a way … to monetize them.”
The article went on to describe various ways the RSS first movers are trying to make money out of their feeds. One of the sites cited in the article, InforWorld.com, said that they realized this need when traffic to their main news RSS feed was almost as large as the traffic to his homepage.
Some of the revenue models being adopted and tested on RSS feeds include:
- Inserting text ads at the bottom of every 5th news entry (InfoWorld)
- Sponsorships as done by LockerGnome
- Feedburner experimenting with putting Amazon affiliate links in the feeds
The verdict is still out as to how publishers can monetize the feeds effectively, without turning off the RSS users in a big way (blinking banners in your RSS feeds, anyone?).
