Sun Dabbles in RSS Advertising

Advertisers are beginning to dabble with RSS. Pheedo, which focuses on Weblog advertising, has posted a case study about a RSS feed campaign that Sun Microsystems ran with measurable results.

The online campaign for a free IT evaluation was conducted through InfoWorld, which reaches IT professionals. The six-week effort outperformed the best click through rate in email by over 26% as compared to the industry average of 8.7% CTR reported in DoubleClick’s Q4 2003 Email Trend Report. Furthermore, they were able to lower the effective CPM by three times of that over email.

To date RSS has been primarily used as an "editorial" delivery mechanism, but it's obvious that just as print, television and the Web, this medium too will eventually become ad-supported as well. Techies might feel this corrupts RSS. It will be interesting to keep an eye on these trends.