There’s been a lot of talk the last few days about the fact that Yahoo! is launching a number of media properties without RSS. The theory is that they want more eyeballs on their actual site through a browser than people only clicking through from their RSS readers when they find something truly interesting or meaningful.
Obviously, advertising revenue is at stake here. But I think Yahoo! is making the wrong decision, long term. If you were an advertiser, would you rather pay a little bit of money every time someone who might or might not care about your product looked at your ad or a little bit more money every time someone who is almost certainly interested in what you’re selling looked at your ad?
Yahoo! is forgetting that context-sensitive advertising–placing ads only with articles that overlap topically with the advertiser’s market–will deliver a smaller but more dedicated audience for an advertiser’s message. Giving users the option to click through from their RSS readers when they really care about a story means that your advertisers will get their message out to the people who care.
Thoughts?
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Joe Beaulaurier 12.01.06 at 6:03 am
To say that enormous Yahoo! is making a decision away from RSS is over the top. More accurately, a group within Yahoo! has placed an emphasis on SEO and mass appeal over what you and I would see as best practices (making best use of available technology).
The one place where I cannot make excuses for this dev/design group is the advertising.yahoo.com property. Nearly every segment would be best served with an RSS feed and the audience should be RSS-aware and if not, here’s a great opportunity to expose them to it.
Jason Preston 12.04.06 at 11:08 am
I disagree - RSS is cool but assuming that the “interested traffic” it sends will give advertisers (and Yahoo!) a higher yield isn’t right.
Yahoo probably sells a lot of ads on a CPM basis, and fewer pageviews = lower revenue, end of story.
Until there’s a good way for RSS (so, RSS readers) to share revenue with content providers, then blanket RSS isn’t a smart bet for a site like Yahoo.
I say Google reader will be the one to do this. Google reader is a great RSS reader (I use it) and it has no ads (not very Google, huh?). I think it’s technically still in beta.
Google has the reach to pull it off, and the experience sharing revenue to set up the system right. So Yahoo! is probably making a good decision to hedge the RSS bet until there’s a proven way to effectively monetize it.
Teresa Valdez Klein 12.04.06 at 2:14 pm
J&J: Good points, both! I understand that there are realities when it comes to maximizing ad revenue, and RSS siphons off those revenues. But we all know that the future of marketing is reaching out to smaller, more focused markets instead of the shotgun approach.
Once advertisers begin to place value on this model, we’ll likely see less of a conflict between monetizing content and RSS.
Thoughts?