Released on = August 10, 2007, 8:03 am

Press Release Author = ConnectThru.com

Industry =

Press Release Summary = An overview of content feeds and their application to
marketing.

Press Release Body =
Charlotte Savino

Print media is quickly losing ground to its free and nubile offspring, the Internet.
Newspapers and magazines are looking for ways to repackage their dying hard-copy
brand of information into something appealing to the fickle web-user - a format
that's prettier, more concise, and a little sneaky.

A growing number of companies are using content feeds to drive traffic to their web
sites. Lifestyle pages on MSN, Yahoo, and AOL have branched out to include redirects
to a variety of magazine and consumer goods pages including Food and Wine, Kraft
Foods, Good Housekeeping, and Esquire. The increased traffic allows sites to
increase their asking price for advertising space to be paid for their content. In
passing it also creates more name recognition for their brand.

The content feed partnership allows media outlets to target their specific
demographic without off-putting direct advertisement. Instead a strategically
inserted headline or photograph on a web-browser homepage places the information
source conveniently in the one-stop pre-categorized homepage. Presumably both
parties benefit as the browser ups their click-rates to various channels and the
media group gains redirect page views.

In addition to shared content, brands are joining together to create original
content to draw in larger audiences. iTunes for example is increasing its content
channels to include more lifestyle programming through video clips and how-to audio.
Martha Stewart Omnimedia has its finger in every pie in that respect, working with
behemoth-sized distribution channels such as Yahoo!, iTunes, and Serius radio.

Much beyond expanding the magazine or newspaper's audience, content feeds also allow
specific targeting to a specific demographic. MSN has three lifestyle channels, one
devoted to men, another to women, and the last most lucrative - the baby boomer.
Delivering that kind of self-selecting audience is an invaluable service, but the
kind of person using the lifestyle pages may not be the ideal consumer. Is a wealthy
baby boomer working a white collar job going to putz around on homepages? Yeah,
maybe in 2003.

The RSS feed phenomenon is marketed to web-users as a service so that readers "don\'t
have to visit each site individually to see what\'s new -- you simply scan headlines
or brief article summaries and click to read the full text"
(http://my.yahoo.com/s/faq/rss/index.html#whatrss) but the nature of the deals are
not quite so selfless or subjective.

The investment in creating a feed is surprisingly high. Given the legal nature of
sharing content, even through redirects, companies must examine each contribution's
copyright and licensing agreements, potentially losing profits due to royalties or a
limited number of potential items to share due to rights.

All of this invested time, money, and effort may not be particularly beneficial for
either party involved. For news sites like Reuters and The New York Times, their
content is so often disseminated across the web that news placement on homepages
doesn't feel as necessary as it did when the websites were first created. For other
areas of feeds, the traffic driven to the original sites is often minimal and the
channels on which they are featured are often buried below news and sports. The
whole effect of the feeds is rather to diminish the individual vitality of the
content and to distract the reader with information overload on their homepage.

As the trend of content sharing continues, homepages will begin implementing
software that learns the taste of the user, much in the way that Pandora's virtual
radio station learns the preferences of the listener and adjusts the song selection
accordingly. If and when this feature is available, the cost of providing the feed
will be much more productive, ensuring an interested audience and an engaged
consumer. This of course is a large vision to soak in all at once, but as if driven
by unseen gears, the relationship between RSS feeds and the "engaged consumer" is
well oiled and functional.


Web Site = http://www.ConnectThru.com

Contact Details = ConnectThru.com