Even though I think that his numbers may be “all wrong”, Dave Morgan has said that RSS advertising is coming fast. He comments on this post at Fred Wilson’s blog, and says that RSS advertising can work. Even Jeff Jarvis has pointed to Dave’s article. I hope Jeff went to Fred Wlison’s blog, and understood the numbers, there. Try not to pay too much attention to those numbers, because they are not solid, at all, but the fact is, he is getting clickthrus from ads that are in RSS feeds. In fact, the way I see the numbers, he’s got an even higher clickthru rate that he thinks!
The reason I think his numbers are off, is that he states that his Feedburner feed is only used by 30% of his 3200 RSS subscribers. He has two other RSS feeds that people are subscribed to. On March 28-30, his web pageviews were 2650, 2700, and 2100. On those days, the RSS views on his Feedburner feed were 2500, 2550, and 1800. He assumes (never assume) that the views are the same across all three of his feeds, and that his RSS views are three times his web page views.
Here’s why the number is wrong: RSS aggregators normally check the RSS feeds every hour. Sometimes more often; sometimes less often. My aggregator usually runs 24 hours a day, creating 24 views for all of the feeds that I subscribe to. I’m sure that everyone doesn’t let their newsreader run for that long, but the fact is that aggregators do create multiple hits, even if the content hasn’t changed or even been viewed.
The important thing about all of this, is that he is getting clickthrus!