May 19, 2006
According to a report by Pheedo (Pheed Read Spring 2006), some ads placed in RSS feeds are getting higher click-through rates than regualar online image ads.
The average CTR of standalone RSS ads is 2.76 percent, while inline RSS ads - those within a feed post - are averaging a 0.45 percent CTR. According to Pheedo's December 2005 report, the CTR of standalone RSS ads averaged 7.99 percent, and inline feed ads averaged 0.85 percent.
Pheedo VP of Marketing Bill Flitter said that although CTRs will slow down, "it will be a much, much less significant drop going into the next quarter."
The highest performing RSS content categories for RSS
advertising are:
-- Comics and Humor: 9.62% CTR
-- Travel: 8.54% CTR
-- Kids and Family: 7.61% CTR
Games, Arts and Literature, and Sports and Recreation came CTRs were more than 4 percent; Politics and Consumer Technology averaged less than 1.5 percent. Pheedo also revealed that the majority of RSS feed advertisers fall into the Auto, Consumer Electronics and Finance categories.
At the same time, clickthrough rates for the RSS feeds themselves (not the ads within them), according to Pheedo, were in the 10-12 percent range. Full-text feeds and partial feeds got pretty much the same results with 10 percent and 12 percent.
Pheedo added that 90 percent of RSS viewers chose to read the content in the aggregator environment only, whether they were full or partial feeds.
The bottom line is that this offers an opportunity to make some money on the feed content at the feed reader or aggregator level.
