Interview by Andy Plesser
Video widgets are not new, but the monetization scheme surrounding this technology is still being sorted out. what is the best business model for widget and it content
RSS has the highest value among Web 2.0 technologies, according to a Forrester Research report released last Friday.
The research firm surveyed 275 IT decision-makers online between April and June.
Twenty-three percent of those surveyed report substantial business value for RSS. One in three uses RSS for marketing purposes. Podcasting came in right behind RSS, with 21% reporting substantial business value.
By contrast, only 11% said blogging delivers substantial business value. Fourteen percent said their company does not measure Web 2.0 business value at all. Of those that do measure, the majority look at traditional metrics such as ROI and total cost of ownership.
In a another Forrester Report Rebecca Jennings (Research senior analyst) said that “Over the next few years, the shift of online marketing from experiment to mainstream will force marketing organizations and processes to change. As different types of social media like MySpace and peer reviews strengthen their grip on users, expect marketers to jump on the bandwagon by switching ad spend to social media forms like RSS, blogs, and networks.”
And You are you already using RSS into Ad or Marketing strategy
At last we have started inputting publishers to the network, you should get your ID sometime soon if you haven’t got it yet.
Once you get it login to the user area and edit the details we have for your feed, these details will be public.
If you want a publisher ID and haven’t contacted us yet register here and then just fill in the form on the ‘publishers’ tab.
Please report any bugs.
We are nearly there, the publisher network is almost finished. As it stands this morning we have two systems left to debug (checkout and RSS) once done the pages will go live and publisher ID’s will be sent out.
Yesterday we finished testing our implementation of Microformats for the publisher network. This means hcard and tag will be available for all feeds added. More information on Microformats can be found here and if you want to see how you can actually use them check out the new Firefox plugin - Operator.
Operator allows browsers to ‘do stuff’ with web pages that have Microformats enabled, such as (for tags) find pages on del.icio.us tagged with that tag, find photos on Flickr, find blogs on Technorati and find answers on Yedda. For us this means if you add the right tags when adding your feed to the network potential advertisers will be able to find out more information about your blog easily. Future updates will include hcalendar for ad availability and maybe hreview for blogs/feeds.
Out of the box Operator supports hcard, tag, hcalendar, hreview and geo. Well worth getting if you’ve found it difficult to understand Microformats.
We are still waiting to hear back from Technorati regarding partnership to allow commercial use of their API but we are pushing ahead with it enabled regardless, unless of course they come back and say no. The Alexa partnership is all set and working, delivery lovely thumbnails of blogs in the network.
Judging by the private beta we’ve been running for the exchange network we’ve seen a 4% click through and a steady rise in subscribers for the feeds taking part, which has to be a good sign for when this goes live.
So, that’s enough writing, back to the debug…
Who doesn’t? One of the features we have been keeping quiet for the Wordpress Plugin is a way for all users to increase their readership through reciprocal advertising - that’s banner exchange in old world speak.
We will be beta testing this over the next few weeks, it means if you don’t have any paid for adverts in your feed and you join the exchange network then banners from others in the network will show, as a member of the network your banner will also appear in other peoples feeds. Giving everyone a chance to build up subscribers for no cost. The good thing is that the banners are only from other Wordpress Bloggers - so your feed will be putting other good blogs in front of your readers and that can’t be a bad thing.
So get making your banner - it needs to be 468 x 60 and GIF or JPG and try and keep it under 15kb, also keep it PG as the network may include viewers who shouldn’t see pictures of you naked. Although if it’s tastefully done and doesn’t involve a cat…
Thanks to all of those people who have asked for a publisher ID for the advertising network - we have not forgotten about you.
We are debugging the the site that will deal with advertising and hopefully by the end of this week you will all have your ID’s.
Once you have an ID and activate advertising in the plugin this banner will appear in all articles in your feed:
The banner will be linked to a page that gives potential advertisers details about your feed, here’s an example:
The page shows your subscribers, grabs a thunmbnail of your site from Alexa, grabs the Cosmos of your blog and the rank from Technorati, shows the views and clicks for ads in your feed averaged over the previous 7 days and the costs to advertise.
If an advertiser chooses your feed then we take payment, inform you and you have the choice to accept or decline the advert. If you accept the ad will appear automatically in your feed for the purchased timescale - one week (7 days) or one month (28 days)
You get to set the price for your adverts and we take a percentage of the sale to cover our costs. We haven’t finalised the percentage but it will be less than AdBrites 30%.
We will pay out every month with no minimum. Initially all payments will be made through PayPal, so you need a PayPal account to get started, but once we get the USA end of the operation setup we will be offering payment by check.
The whole idea behind the network is that advertisers can select a ‘basket’ of feeds to advertise on, this allows them to hit a wide target area in the long tail, it also means advertisers won’t just be targetting feeds with lots of subscribers. If they want to advertise to say 10,000 people they can select as many feeds as they need to hit this number.
As always we are more than happy to get your feedback and hope we can build something that is a good fit for the vast majority of blogs out there that don’t have 20,000 subscribers.
On a different note please subscribe to our feed, the plugin is beta, over the next few weeks it is likely that we will release new versions as we fix bugs and add features, I noticed today that the number of downloads (over 300 so far) is vastly greater than subscribers and I’m worried people will be left with old versions not knowing a new one is out - so subscribe.
