Understanding RSS & XML Feeds

  Recorded Live December 8, 2006

What is a Feed?

In this segment Rick explains what a feed is, what is found in them and why the content is so compelling.

Who Subscribes to Feeds

In segment two we talk with Rick about the dynamics of how feed content is discovered and what makes people subscribe.

Understanding How Feeds are Subscribed To

Like most things in life, there is more than one way to accomplish what you want, and subscribing to feeds is no different. Rick talks with us about the various ways to subscribe to feeds and what people do once they subscribe to them.

How Feed Publishers Make Money: Advertising Opportunities Using Feeds

As this medium grows in popularity, advertising opportunities also mature and are appealing to a broader audience of potential advertisers. In this and our final segment, Rick explains how publishers make money producing feeds.

FeedBurner is the world's largest feed management provider. Their Web-based services help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.

Rick Klau Interview Summary

Chatting with eMarketing Talk Show hosts Cindy Turrietta and Brooke Schumacher, Rick Klau, the Vice President of Business Development at FeedBurner explains what RSS and XML feeds are, who subscribes to them and the advertising opportunities available in this new medium.

Vice President of Business Development at FeedBurner, the market-leading feed management provider, Rick Klau is also an accomplished public speaker, moderator, panelist and author of a popular blog. He has published a number of books and columns covering the topics of technology, law, ecommerce and online security and has received extensive coverage in a variety of major media publications throughout his career including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, Internet World and The Washington Post.

Rick starts off this edition of the eMarketing Talk Show by explaining precisely what feeds are. According to him feeds are a term applied broadly to a whole class of subscribeable content. “What a feed does is it tells your browser that this is content I want to come to me on a regular basis.” Many browsers today, including the latest version of Internet Explorer, the most current versions of Firefox, Safari, Opera, and pretty much every major browser now supports the ability for a user to subscribe to a feed. There are also websites like Bloglines.com, Newsgator.com, and web services like My Yahoo and Google Reader that are increasingly common and popular ways for people to subscribe to content. “Now these subscriptions typically point at a file, what we refer to as a feed on a publisher’s website.” A publisher here can mean the Wall Street Journal, any new publication, podcasters and even bloggers.

Explaining about being able to track an audience, Rick says that pretty much every publisher out there today has tools at their disposal that can ensure that all requests for their feeds go through FeedBurner. This involves server configuration if you are using a web log application like WordPress or TypePad, or often it is an automatic setting in the configuration. “Once this happens all of the requests for your feed end up going through FeedBurner and we are able to then measure the size of your audience, the activity of your audience, what pieces of content are they reading, listening to or watching, where are they going, are they clicking on links and which applications are they using to consume that content.” Once you have this data, Rick says, “You are able to better understand your audience as a publisher.”

Rick goes on to tell listeners that ultimately what feeds have done is to give end users the ability to decide that there’s content that they like and have it automatically delivered to them. It has the advantage over say email in that there’s no spam. “You only receive the feeds that you decide you want,” and there is no opportunity for someone to illicitly place content into a feed. Furthermore, you as a user do not have to give anything up. It is completely anonymous and when you decide you are done, you can turn that subscription off and that publisher no longer has the ability to reach you.

Chatting about feed audiences and how to define them, Rick says that a year or two ago you might have been able to answer that pretty definitively and say that feed readers are early adopters and that they are very tech savvy. “Today, I think that the feed audience is the web audience. Increasingly we are seeing such a tremendous overlap that feeds really are going mainstream.” What this means is if there’s content you like, you can subscribe to it and that means that for every type of content, there is some kind of an audience out there.

Rick feels that now it is hard to pigeonhole the feed audience anymore, whereas it used to be much easier a while ago. We are seeing such an explosion across the spectrum which is pretty exciting because it means that truly feeds have gone from an adopter phase into very much a mainstream medium. Concurring with a MarketingSherpa report published in August 2006, Rick agrees that a majority of feed listeners are 35 or older. In his opinion often people lose sight of the fact that as new as this technology is, it has a very broad applicability and “people tend to forget that.”

Talking about how people subscribe to feeds, Rick says that being in the business of measuring feed consumption; he has seen more than 3,000 different applications consume feeds. They are as diverse as iTunes, TiVo, email applications and cell phones. The reality, according to Rick, is that they all have their own mechanisms for enabling people to subscribe to content.

“We at FeedBurner have tried to address that usability issue by making feeds much more presentable and this has helped dramatically,” Rick says. When people used to look at a raw XML file in a browser i.e. before FeedBurner applied a style sheet to them, people would get awfully confused. By addressing the usability issue and making feeds much more presentable, we have seen direct evidence of subscriber growth trending up.

Today Rick feels that video podcasts are just as and even more popular than audio podcasts. For him the release of the video iPod has helped accelerate the adoption of video. Some of his recommended podcasts include Ze Frank’s “The Show”, Ask A Ninja and video podcasts by CNN.

In the final segment of the show Rick talks about the advertising opportunities available in feeds and explains that feeds are free because of a variety for technical reasons as charging end users for the feed is often problematic. The good news though is that there are a number of publishers who are making significant amounts of money. “Advertisers buy ad spaces through us in the particular channel,” Rick explains, “and they pay us a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and we share that revenue.” The majority of the revenue goes to the publisher and we get a percentage and that allows publishers who are offering content for free to monetize the audience in a way that’s not off-putting, but is very valuable for the advertisers, because they get to be associated with quality content in a medium that is very engaging.

Rick elaborates more saying that feeds are targeting ads, not to the words in the post or the click as the desired result. “We are targeting the audience,” and are doing so with the publisher’s involvement, and the advertisers are paying for the presentation of the ads, for the impression instead of the click, as the feed model is one that is highly consumption driven. While the ad might not necessarily lead to click, it may yet serve a very important purpose. In conclusion Rick says, “What we are trying to help build is a brand advertising network.”