Experiments in the RSS economy: the sequel

Two years ago tomorrow, InfoWorld began experimenting with RSS advertising. Our experimentation has continued since then and we have tweaked the feeds in lots of different ways, but our basic approach has been consistent. Today we upped the ante considerably in our experiments.

Our VP/GM of Online Matt McAlister announced this morning that we've rolled out full-text RSS feeds for our content, incorporating 336x280 ads from DoubleClick into the feed to help pay the bills, along with related links driven by our del.icio.us experiments. I'm biased because I work here, but I'll put a stake in the ground and say that mixing advertising in a full-text feed with content produced from a staff of writers and copy editors seems reasonable. Matt asks two key business questions that until now, everyone has hypothesized about, but not really tested:

1) What impact does the additional exposure of content in our feeds have on our site traffic? Will people visit the web site less?
2) We have a lot of revenue drivers on every page of the site. So, will the advertising revenue from the feeds make up the difference in lost traffic value?

Arriving at the answers to these questions is going to be really interesting.

Matt is on a roll these days -- if you didn't read his post What is the future for Web sites in a world of RSS? a couple of weeks ago, then you missed a thoughtful and honest essay on what it means to work inside a traditional media company in the new world of aggregation (a post that got nice pointage from places like BusinessWeek and Micro Persuasion). Posted by Chad Dickerson at June 9, 2005 11:59 AM