Resource Review #7: What An RSS Feed Reveals About Its Subscriber

Circulation Management; Nov2008, Vol. 23 Issue 9, p11-11.

This article interested me because it is written from a marketing perspective, authored by Bill Flitter, the CEO of Pheedo, a company that "creates new kinds of profit driven advertising services through distributed content, like RSS, for our publishers and advertisers."

Flitter's column is promoting the usefulness of looking at people's RSS feeds to determine their interests, therefore a worthwhile activity for advertisers. Flitter claims that RSS feed subscribers have an emotional connection to the content they receive because they have made a decision to follow a particular website, showing trust and devotion. Flitter points out that by looking at users RSS feeds, you aren't only detecting user behavior, you're getting to know that user.

He explains, "And if you take a look at where things are going with the subscription model-especially with RSS-it's really about context. I know what you're going to do tomorrow because I know you're going to open your feed. I know you're going to click on X numbers of articles and then I know what those articles are going to be. So I can paint a much deeper picture of you. And it's a deeper layer of commitment than even behavioral targeting is doing today."

I chose this to comment on this article because in my research I've come across a fair amount of information regarding RSS in a marketing light. For me, it was another reminder to the growing force of digital capitalism. Last year, in my class on the Digital Divide, one of many things I learned was that with the introduction of any new technology, it is the only the product of the society it was created in, and that it will come to exhibit those characteristics inherent in the culture. So, we see that in our culture of consumerism and profit, the Internet is slowly becoming saturated with advertisements and shopping. RSS is just another avenue to provide and conduct these activities. Boohoo.