Steve Olechowski from Feedburner shared a number of insights and tidbits on RSS feeds:
- The more text you make available in a feed, the more traffic you will have (this is counter-intuitive to a number of marketers who make users visit their sites to view the whole post).
- Understand that your feed audience is totally different than your blog audience.
- Feed categories: podcast feeds are more evenly distributed across various categories (tech, fashion, business, entertainment, etc) than text feeds (still heavily tech).
- 15% of podcasts are video
- More Japanese & Chinese blogs than North America & Europe
- RSS - bigger than blogs! Over 3000 RSS readers and aggregators.
- 7% of all clicks from feeds are by bots; make sure you take this into account when measuring traffic
- MyYahoo has over 50% of Feedburner traffic. They are successful because they make the technology transparent to the end user!
- Firefox live bookmarks - very big for European feeds
- There are 2900 mobile agents
- Feeds *are* making money. Ads for feeds are quite different than search. Feed advertising is much more about awareness, more brand advertising.
It's great to hear this stuff right from the source!
I highlighted the main takeaways for me, but it really boils down to the fact that RSS is still relatively untapped as a marketing vehicle. It's not just a technology that delivers blog content; it's something altogether different.
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