I recently read the case study conducted by Pheedo, an advertising company on the use of RSS Feeds advertising versus email advertising.

The difference in results were staggering.

Pheedo ran the campaign for 6 weeks and from their results, RSS feeds outperformed the best click through rate in email by over 26% as compared to the industry average of 8.7%.

Surprised? Let's investigate the benefits of RSS advertising versus email ads.

RSS advertising has a number of 'superior' advantages compared to email ads:

1. RSS feeds does not face a delivery issue in an anti-SPAM environment that is being filled with filters, anti-virus software or whatever program that is put in place by the user to block SPAM and unwanted emails.

2. RSS feeds cost ZERO to track. With a burned feed, you can easily track how many people are subscribing to your feed.

With email, if you want to track how many of your mails were delivered, you would have to pay for the additional services.

A simple mathematical illustration can prove this:

Let's say Cost per 1,000 impressions = $50 And you want to do 10,000 impressions per week.

So the cost would be = $50 x 10 = $500 per week.

With Email Advertising, you would need to include email monitoring delivery charges.

So your total cost would be $500 + X per week

where X is the additonal costs for email monitoring delivery

So your advertising costs go up. Mutiply the above figure with 48 weeks (1 year) and you can see how costly it is to run email advertising campaigns.

With RSS Advertising, there is ZERO monitory delivery charges.

You maximise every penny from your advertising dollar, and the costs go down!

3. RSS feeds is 100% Opt-in. We're talking about readers who know what they want and educated enough to know how to subscribe to feeds, either with desktop readers or through the use of some online newsreader such as Bloglines, MyYahoo and so on.

Yes, there is also 'opt-in' email. But then again, opt-in email is getting less effective because of:

a) constant bombardment of emails from other marketers and advertisers, making the subscribers 'numb' to advertising message

b) keywords that trigger off SPAM filter, causing failed delivery message

RSS feeds do not face these two problems. RSS feeds has a 100% delivery rate and has no SPAM issue as it is a feed, not email.

It will be interesting to see the continued developments in the use of RSS feeds for advertising.