CYBERSPACE – Within five years email may well face a major competitor for its advertising dollars, according to mainstream internet insiders with an eye to the future. The fresh faced marketing contender that’s getting all the attention is Really Simple Syndication – called RSS for short.Currently, the majority of RSS feeds, such as those found on websites belonging to PBS, Amazon.com, Craigslist, Continental Airline Vacations, or the British Broadcasting Corporation, serve a purely informational purpose, providing visitors with headlines and short summations of product offerings, news articles, or information that can be found elsewhere on the site. Although these can certainly be seen as advertising of a sort, they are not product or service advertisements per se. Not all site owners are satisfied with this situation and, in fact, are seeking ways to turn the RSS feeds into additional forms of advertising revenue.

WashingtonPost.com is only one of a growing number of companies exploring ways to expand beyond headlines, summaries, and links into something more lucrative. According to Tim Ruder, Vice President of Marketing for Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, the feeds are attracting eyeballs at an ever-increasing rate. Although statistics across the board are unknown, the New York Times web presence reports that the installation of RSS feeds has driven traffic from 500,000 visitors a month at the end of 2003 to 7.3 million this past April. It’s no wonder that sites seeing this kind of rise in visitors would like to associate those numbers with ad revenue.

As it stands now, RSS is still new and users don’t appear to spend much time looking at the origins of the RSS feed content. Instead, they simply view the feeds directly, which is one reason that Google has encouraged its content providers to not hold anything back. Instead of just sending headlines, the innovative search giant suggests all content be included – with any ads placed at the end of the feed. Shuman Ghosemajumder, a business product manager for Google, understands that desire for companies to jump on the RSS feed bandwagon as a vehicle for product and service marketing, but also wants to make sure the feeds continue to serve their original purpose.

“We need to preserve all the things that are good about RSS feeds right now and also introduce the opportunity for publishers to monetize those feeds,” Ghosemajumder insists.

As RSS becomes an increasingly mainstream and familiar part of the web experience, experts anticipate that its value as an advertising medium will increase, with some claiming it will eventually compete with email as an effective tool for getting the word out – without violating the privacy of visitors or running the risk of the medium becoming yet another version of spam.

“Anything that’s done to hide the technology and just make a more relevant user experience, that will grow the RSS market and grow the advertising market,” explains Scott Rafer, chief executive of Feedster, an RSS search engine and advertising network. If Rafer is correct, many believe that it is likely that within the next five years email will return to being a medium primarily used for communication while RSS feds will provide news and information.

Rafer continues by foreseeing a day when broadband users will use RSS “whether they know it or not.” That day may not be too far in the future, given that Yahoo already has feeds on its “My Yahoo” pages and Microsoft has announced plans to incorporate the TiVo like technology into its next Windows operating system, set for release during the second half of 2006.

As popular as RSS technology is expected to be, there is still plenty of challenge for those who hope to turn it into a profitable ad source. Companies currently experimenting with advertisements placed in RSS feeds are in the process of tracking ad clicks and determining how many lead to actual ad views. With ad rates ranging from 50 cents to $1.75 per click via Pheedo.com, the question is an important one, especially for niche advertisers who tend to pay more per-click. Visitor demographics indicate that younger, more financially well off surfers are more likely to be attracted by RSS feeds, generally in an attempt to access specific kinds of content. Because more involved visitors tend to have a more positive opinion of viewing advertising materials and making online purchases, ad developers recommend that RSS text be informative and conversational in its approach. Pheedo research indicates that 500 word ads tend to work better than shorter ones, since users tend to prefer to read pitches that appear in their RSS screen alone, without needing to click to another site for more details.

Advertising in RSS feeds is still quite new, with only a few sites, including Google, Yahoo Search Marketing, Feedster, and Pheedo offering RSS advertising options. Verizon is one of the larger companies tentatively exploring ad space in the RSS info streams and tech companies such as Microsoft and Sun Microsystems embracing the technology first.

If the buzz about RSS feeds and their ability to download customized information to a user’s desktop for later viewing becomes reality, there may be a day when one’s Inbox is no longer a battlefield and advertisements in traditional media such as print, radio, or television is far less common than today.