How RSS Affects Content Monetization

July 11, 2005 | 17 Comments

Feed readers are changing the way people read and access content. It’s a fact. I’m even noticing a change in my own reading habits and I was one of those people who always used RSS as a notification mechanism.

Now I find myself reading who articles via my feed reader. This is a marked change in my own reading habits, I think brought on by convenience and the ever growing number of content channels I’m interested in keeping track of.

I’ve also noticed a similar trend in my own sites and it’s really making me think about how I create and distribute content. One of the things that’s been on my mind is monetization of content and how the game is rapidly changing.

Advertising, RSS and Google

As of right now it seems that advertising is the best way to make money via content for most people. I know it is for myself. The problem is that most people place ads on their browser-delivered Web site and as people begin to spend more time reading content outside the browser they’re also spending less time seeing, and clicking on, ads.

I think the best way I can illustrate this is to talk about my own experience.

I launched To-Done a few months back. My goal was not to make money, but once it got going and I was seeing that people were getting value from it, I put more effort into it, invested some of my own time and money into it and hoped to see some return.

In some way I’m seeing that return, and it’s still early. But there are a few things that I need to sort out. For example, it’s already got a larger subscribed readership than Asterisk, yet it doesn’t make near as much money. Why? I can think of two possible reasons:

Many of my readers at To-Done read my posts via a feed reader. My stats point to this a bit, but it’s too early to say beyond a shadow of a doubt.
To-Done has a page rank of 0. I find that most of my advertising revenue comes from people who come in via search.

I’ve found that my regular readers here at Asterisk aren’t the type that click on ads and that the posts that seem to generate click-through are those that are “off-topic”. I’ve also found that placing ads in my feeds for Asterisk is a waste of time (for now anyway) and that offering full feeds (as opposed to summaries) has little effect on my revenue.

Over at To-Done, which has an entirely different readership, I was expecting a bit more in terms of ad revenue. At least in relation to Asterisk. I didn’t start the site to make money, but as with everything I publish, the money is an incentive to keep it going. Plus, now I’ve put a bit of my own money in to kind of kick it up a notch.

I figure I’ve got two immediate options to try:

I can add ads to my feeds.
I can force people to the site with summaries.

Right now I don’t see either one of these as ideal. I’m going to try adding ads to the feeds first. This seems the least intrusive of the two options. However, I have my doubts as to the viability of that option. Then again, I’ve seen here at Asterisk that forcing people to the site doesn’t really help much either.

As you can see, as good as it is for your audience, if you’re looking to make money from your content, syndication presents a problem. When it comes to To-Done, I enjoy writing there and will keep it going regardless, but my hope is that it’d start to turn a profit equalling the value people seem to be getting from it.

And I really want to be able to put even more into my sites. Someday maybe.

What does the future hold?

We’re still trying to figure out viable ways to monetize content. I would expect advertisers and those who enable advertising to find clever new ways to place ads within feeds. Readers will hate this at first, but it’s inevitable.

As well, I feel that once we’ve got better ways to search feeds we’ll have more options in terms of monetization. Right now there are browser-based search engines and to be honest it’s via those that I see the vast majority of my revenue from advertising. I’d expect the same could be said by many independent publishers.

The regular readership either tends to ignore ads, or they access the content in a way that they don’t see most of them. As more and more people get turned on to RSS, less and less revenue will be coming in, at least based on the current model. From a publisher’s point of view, this isn’t exactly exciting.

I mean, even now, you’ll see publishers who will force you to their site. Usually this is to get eyeballs on ads, but it could be for various other reasons. Copyright, design integrity, etc. I see this as a losing proposition in the long run, but that’s just my opinion. I hope I’m wrong, I totally respect the want to have people actual visit your site.

I could see something like sponsorship working well, but I’m not sure, when it comes to feeds, how it would be done.

Regardless, things are shifting as we speak. It’s my hope that the future holds more money for publishers with less burden placed on their audience. It’s a tough balance to try to find and will take all sorts of tinkering, thinking and experimenting but in the end I think we’ll find an acceptible balance between publisher and reader.

You can bet syndication will be a big piece of the puzzle.

Filed under: Content
Keyword Tags: rss atom monetization content

Comments

1. Steven Ametjan said:

One thing that will be interesting to note is how many feed readers start supporting Author XSLT files. I haven’t had a chance to do much research on it, but I don’t believe too many offer this. Once enough authors begin expressing a desire for their RSS to be presented in a feed reader as they want it, rather than as the feed reader specifies, I think they will start supporting it. Once that starts to occur then people will be linking to XSL files in their feeds much as we do with CSS now, and presenting the people who use feed readers with a styled view that is equivalent to viewing the site in the browser… complete with ads.

Posted on July 11, 2005 11:52 AM | #

2. Michael Moncur said:

I make almost all of my income from web advertising, so here’s my take on this.

As for why To-Done makes less money, both #1 and #2 are correct–you don’t make advertising money from regular readers, you make it from searchers. This is true on all of my sites. (Regular readers are the ones using RSS, but they probably wouldn’t click on ads regardless.)

Proceeding from there, your “two immediate options” are both largely a waste of time. I haven’t seen any evidence of RSS ads making money for anything but very busy sites, and forcing people to click through from a summary just exposes more regular readers to ads, and they’re not the people who click on them.

So for now, your best bet is to work on getting more search visitors. This will probably happen at the next PR update, and you can encourage it by continuing to write great posts that people will link to.

Long term, obviously, as more and more people read via RSS, regular ad income from searchers is going to decrease. Two solutions to that come to mind:

1. Find ways to make money from regular readers instead of from searchers. (Memberships, pledges, tips, merchandising, etc.)

2. As RSS gets bigger, more and more people will become the RSS equivalent of “searchers” - rather than subscribing to your feed, they’re reading it within a search feed, or a technorati tag feed. At some point these people will likely outnumber your regular readers, and like today’s searchers, they will probably be more likely to click on an ad than a regular reader. So don’t write RSS advertising off entirely.

Posted on July 11, 2005 02:11 PM | #

3. R. Marie Cox said:

Great comment MM. To follow that up: Why adsense for feeds is a bad idea (at least for now).

Posted on July 11, 2005 02:57 PM | #

4. Keith said:

Michael – Thanks for the great comment. That pretty much sums up what I was thinking. As to your two solutions. I don’t see #1 working all that well. But it’s something to think about. As to #2 – this is where I see an opportunity coming down the pike.

My overall plan for this stuff is to keep writing. I mean, I like doing it and wish I could write more, but I’ll do what I can for now and maybe some day I’ll have the time to really put some serious effort into it.

Posted on July 11, 2005 03:04 PM | #

5. Jason Marble said:

I think Michael brought up a good point in #2. In fact, I was going to say somthing along the lines of summaries only for RSS, but a full article could posibly give some better returns as far as RSS searching is considered.

It seeems that if you’ve gained a loyal reader or a subscriber, I’d be suprised if you made any revenue through adsense at all from that reader. I’d imagine almost all of the revenue coming from non-subscribers. So, it seems that placing adsense in an RSS feed for your readers doesn’t make much sense. But if you were to place a weekly or monthly ad for a single sponsor with a product or service that you think is good – simillar to what Coudal does – I, as a subscriber, would be much more inclined to actually click on the ad, seeing that it is something you would recomend.

I know I’m probably getting into a whole nother topic in itself, but I think something along those lines is really the only way you can insure some return through advertising within your RSS feeds.

Posted on July 11, 2005 06:37 PM | #

6. Joshua Porter said:

Keith, I’ve read your stuff for about 2 years now, always liking it.

It scares me to think, from a reader’s perspective, that your two options have nothing to do with making my life (as a reader) better. In fact, both make things worse.

On the other hand, your insights in this post are useful. It is because of posts like this that I keep reading. Since I don’t have advertising on my site, I never would have known that most ad revenue comes from searchers and not regular readers. I do know, however, that on my site that the number of searchers increases as I post more, even if those folks are going to older posts. It’s almost as if my site has more pagerank simply because I post more…

Also, it was interesting to hear from Michael Moncur. I’ve read his stuff for about a year and I can’t even tell you what his site looks like…I guess you could say that all value I get I steal…because I’ve never once clicked on an ad of his.

That’s the thing about advertising…have you ever heard someone say “Boy, I’m glad there’s advertising on this site!”?

Posted on July 12, 2005 04:04 AM | #

7. Egor Kloos said:

Funny I’ve actually started to read webpages again. RSS feeds just don’t give me that right vibe. But I’d agree that RSS is having a big impact on content. Editorial processes need to take into account which media channels their content is being distributed on. RSS is now becoming more and more a part of that mix.

The amazing growth of community widens the gap between the web haves and web have nots. I still get questions to explain what a weblog is.

Posted on July 12, 2005 05:21 AM | #

8. Keith said:

Joshua – You hit on the exact reason why publishing on the Web is so hard. I put soooo much work into my sites and people say they get soooo much out of yet, yet the only viable way I can make any money is via advertising, which hurts the experience.

Sure Kottke might have been able to make some money in micropayments, but his situation is fairly unique and to be honest I doubt it’s in any way sustainable and I highly doubt he makes as much that way as he could via advertising.

As well, even with the money I’ve got coming in to my sites, I don’t get out near what I put in as far as money goes, but I get enough to keep going. To a certain degree I’m still doing this because I like to do it. Most of the money I earn from my sites goes right back in to them in some way or another.

But it gets harder every day. It’s a lot of work and frankly what people perceive as benefits are over-rated. I ask myself “is this worth it?” all the time. If it was all about money the answer would be “no fucking way.”

If it was all about money I’d stop posting about Web desing and blogging and information architecture.

Until lots of people like yourself are willing to contribute to independent publishing in a major way (it’s never going to happen) you’re stuck with advertising. It’s the price you pay for good content. And, let’s face it, you’re getting the deal of the century on many, many sites out there.

I find it humorous when readers complain about me or another publisher trying to make money. (I’m not saying you’re doing this.) If I made no money you’d not have all that content you enjoy and yeah, the funny thing is those who get the most value from it don’t even pay for it.

I should complain about my readers being stingy. :)

So, all my fine readers, thank the masses searching Google and finding little nuggets on my site. They’re fittin’ the bill for this here enterprise.

Posted on July 12, 2005 08:54 AM | #

9. Joshua Porter said:

Keith, thanks for being so honest. I think that there are a million conversations like this out there that aren’t being had because people don’t like talking about money. The fact is, though, that money drives a large part of everything we do.

As for myself, I spend 10-20 hours a week on my blog, and I have never received a cent for it (you’re getting *some* money). I’m not trying to be high and mighty by leaving out advertising, I just focus on the *other* things that I get from it. For one thing, I get a lot of emails from people who like this or that, or hate this or that. I get real happiness when someone says they liked something that I wrote (a sort of natural high). I have also found that it serves as a portfolio of my life, and frankly, many people are impressed by a “blog”. The vast majority of people don’t have one, of course, and are scared to death by the thought of writing in public. In sum, my blog has definitely helped me professionally (and karmically), and I’m sure yours has helped you. So it can’t be a total loss…

But back to your dilemma. From what small evidence I have of the size of your readership, I wonder why you don’t *ask* for money. Have you tried before? (I don’t remember you doing so).

One other thing…how many bloody sites have you got, anyway? They’re almost wrapping down there, for crying out loud. I now completely understand why you feel this way…you must be blogging in every waking minute!

Posted on July 12, 2005 10:57 AM | #

10. Keith said:

Joshua – I’ve got 5 sites. I actively post in 3 of them. It’s funny because some of my readers had a negative reaction to them. One guy called them “money spinners” – if he only knew. I really don’t post that much more, I just post in different spots. The idea was to speak to new audiences and expand my writing skills.

I want to make sure something is crystal clear. I never said anything was a total loss. And I don’t write soley for money. However, I, like Kottke, would love to write for a living. I love doing it and would keep it up if I didn’t make anything. I didn’t make anything for years before I placed the first ad on my site and I don’t make that much now…

As far as what I get out of it. I, like you, get quite a bit of personal happiness from meeting people and talking about things like this with good people like you. I also enjoy helping people and I love to write.

The professional benefits are over-rated. I still have to pay to send myself to conferences, even when I speak and I’ve not got all that much new work from my sites. It’s all good, but not what some people think.

As far as asking for money. It just seems cheezy and I don’t think it’d work. Especially because I don’t need it and it’s not sustainable. The thing is, I’d love to get my writing to the point where it could sustain me for awhile. So I could do what I do and maybe go into business for myself.

In all honesty, that is my goal – to get to where I make my own money for myself. While I don’t get a ton from advertising, it’s a start and it does seem to be building, if slowly. Ads do work, contrary to what you might have heard.

I’m not trying to get rich, but like many other independent publishers, I’d like to make what my content is worth. That’s all.

Posted on July 12, 2005 12:05 PM | #

11. Henrik Lied said:

Why does everyone use the word `RSS` to describe several types of syndication formats? :)

Posted on July 12, 2005 05:59 PM | #

12. Keith said:

Henrik - Haha…I actually thought quite a bit about that. I chose RSS simply because it was short and I figured most of my readers would know what I was talking about.

Posted on July 12, 2005 06:55 PM | #

13. Henrik Lied said:

Keith: Fair enough, if you regard your audience as `not the most up to date` on those issues, it’s understandable. :)

Posted on July 13, 2005 08:57 AM | #

14. nick said:

Slashdot’s model makes a lot of sense.

They give you full text in feeds, but no links.

Simple to the point of obvious, and sometimes frustrating, but effective. It puts eyeballs on the expensive banner ads (in theory).

Posted on July 18, 2005 06:48 PM | #

15. AC said:

Hi, I don’t believe in making money thru advertising on your content. The web is meant for free information. If you put in much effort in creating good content (good meaning free, useful information) for your readers and did good marketing, you will get good traffic. Note that people are looking for FREE useful information. They are NOT looking for ad links to click on. That makes sense to me. Therefore, I don’t think readers will click on those google ad links in between paragraphs. I found it very iritating and think that the article or blog is money-making oriented. It’s not very genuine. It’s a purpose: to “lure” me to click on those links! I rarely (99.99 %) will not click on google ad links. Do you? Think about it yourself. Would you click on those ad links yourself? If you wouldn’t, why would you think your readers would click on them? See, as we notice the phenonma, ads have changed from graphics-based ads to text-based ads. It’s the same to me. Why? Because I am not looking for ad links to click but FREE useful information which you wrote and I am interested. It’s that simple.

I myself have a blog site. I never add any ad links in my content. Why? Because I don’t make money that way. If I have to make money, I will make it clear to the visitors and say I am providing this and that service. If you’re interested, you’re free to contact me for free consultation. That’s what I will do. After all, I will expect others to be clear about what they are offering. If you try to “lure” into some kind of advertising and expect me to give you business, I would feel you are in fact cheating me! Do you think your readers would think the same way like I do?

Posted on July 18, 2005 10:50 PM | #

16. Dand said:

It is because of posts like this that I keep reading. Since I don’t have advertising on my site, I never would have known that most ad revenue comes from searchers and not regular readers. I do know, however, that on my site that the number of searchers increases as I post more, even if those folks are going to older posts.

Posted on July 21, 2005 01:28 AM | #