Over at eMarketer.com James Belcher is commenting on how RSS is still attracting a great deal of interest with people in the digital advertising industry but the popularity of the technology is far from mainstream with the people we’re trying to target.
Apparently only 2% of the US Internet using population actively use RSS on a regular basis, and only 9% know what it is at all.
But, as he correctly points out, the main reason for this (something I have voiced often myself to people I work with in my own agency when trying to persuade them to buy into RSS at this very early stage) is that RSS simply isn’t available in mainstream products (and by that we generally mean Operating Systems) at the moment. Yes, it’s in OS X and Safari, but that’s hardly mainstream for most of the world, as much as that probably annoys many of us, and the real tipping point for RSS will undoubtedly be the release of Windows Vista in 2007 (fingers crossed!).
Until then, RSS will remain a technology on the outside looking in but it truly is a powerful tool and I cannot wait until it’s firmly embedded in our tool kit as digital marketers.
One thing I just want to point out from James’s post is that he says that marketers are interested in using RSS to get around spam filters. Whilst this probably is true for a lot of people in this industry I really hope that it’s not the majority of us. To think like that, to treat RSS as a broadcast medium, is such an old school traditional DM way of thinking. It’s more than that – it’s to do with the whole shift in the advertising relationship and how we communicate with our audience. Spam filters are in irrelevant if your already speaking to people who have choosen to listen in the first place.
Howard
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September 5th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
I fully agree, the email guys that think RSS is just another way to spam are way off the pace!