Clever, distributed, Web 2.0 marketing - powered by RSS

  • Article

Noticed something this morning. Let me try to explain....

Mary Jo Foley (of Microsoft Watch) is carrying ads in her RSS feed (in fact this is provided via ZiffDavis.com - MW is a ZD company)) - no news there I think. What's funny is that her RSS feed carried an ad for another RSS feed also provided by ZDNet (see Fig.1). The ad's link points to this .xml file (RSS). This RSS file's content are ads for IBM (co-sponsored content and links back to IBM.com, see Fig.2).

So - we have an industry analyst 'selling' RSS media to another media company (itself) and a media company effectively re-selling this RSS media to IBM on a Microsoft-focused site...! Nice.

 

Fig.1. Above: Mary Jo Foley's RSS feed, with carrying an advert (by ZDNet for IBM) for another RSS feed.

 

Fig.2. Above: The ZDNet / IBM RSS feed advertised within MJF's feed. The content items include snippets of eWeek IBM-related articles with links to the eWeek site and snippets of IBM.com content that links to their site.

This is clever, distributed, Web 2.0 marketing - powered by RSS. I'd love to know how the campaign goes (CTRs/subscription rates to the advertised RSS feed and CTRs and conversions from that RSS feed).