According to a report in ClickZ, Gawker Media sequentially grew its revenue from feed-driven traffic by 300 percent in Q1 2008. Gawker Sales Chief Chris Batty told ClickZ that the company is now pulling an average CPM of $4 or $5 for its RSS inventory, “a little less than we get on the sites.”

RSS, which stands for “Really Simple Syndication” is a method whereby users can draw content from publishers without being on the publisher’s website. To view content via RSS, you need an RSS reader, such as Google Reader or any of hundreds of other applications. It’s the heart and soul of widgets and other place-based distribution models, but it’s just not a big deal in the U.S.

Thirty-four percent of global respondents to a March social media survey from Universal McCann said they had “ever” subscribed to an RSS feed. That represents a large jump from the previous year’s findings, when the agency found just 15 percent said they had subscribed to a feed. The data were gathered from 17,000 Internet users in 29 countries, aged 16 to 54.

However the U.S. ranks far down on the adoption list, with penetration of only 18.6 percent. That’s tiny compared to RSS-addicted nations like Russia (57 percent adoption), Brazil (55 percent) and China (54 percent). Additionally, of those who access feeds, only 25 percent of U.S. respondents said they do so daily. Another 35 percent said they access them weekly, while 16 percent said feed reading is a monthly endeavor.

The U.S. is down the list — and therefore is missing revenue opportunities — because media companies here don’t care for RSS and don’t promote it. Why? Because we want people to come to OUR sites, not consume our products elsewhere (see: “Disconnect” below). Moreover, most RSS feeds from U.S. media companies are simply “teases” designed to bring people back to the site of origin, so that we can expose them to our display advertising. While this is entirely understandable from a mass marketing perspective, it is self-destructive in the long run, because people will consume media where they want to consume it. The smart media company will acknowledge this, and create ways to make money in that paradigm.

Top dog in the RSS advertising world used to be FeedBurner, until it was purchased by Google. Adsense is now the format, which leaves the experimentation up to companies like Pheedo. I like Pheedo and have always thought they’re a good partner for media companies.

But there are two other ways to make money with RSS that most don’t see. One, you can insert ads as items in a feed. As long as they are marked as advertisements, I see no ethical problem in doing this. Ads delivered this way, show a much higher click-through rate than other forms of web advertising, so it’s a no-brainer for advertisers. We don’t do this, because we’re afraid of RSS and sending people away from our (artificial) grasp.

Two, you can create and sell ad feeds. One day, this will become the new sales insert that the newspaper industry has known for so long. Everybody needs to shop, so access to information about deals and the like is important, even for people who hate commercial interruptions in their lives. Ad feeds are user-friendly, and allow people to peruse them at their own convenience. Again, we don’t do this, because that would mean wholesale adaption of RSS as a delivery mechanism.

Pheedo CEO Bill Fritter told ClickZ that he’s definitely noticed an uptick in consumer use of RSS, and that has created a glut of RSS ad inventory.

Pheedo sells about 50 percent of the inventory it represents directly, and for the rest it pulls a feed from ad partners including MIVA, Ask.com, and Business.com.

“Some of our publishers are seeing their page views from RSS are nearing page views of Web sites,” he said. “The market’s finally there. The growth is finally there.”

I’m not so convinced that it’s “finally there,” but I think that when it is “there,” and local media companies are selling it and serving the ads along with a remnant partner such a Pheedo, we’ll be amazed at what kind of money we can make by letting people have what they want — the ability to view our content wherever they choose.

(Originally posted in AR&D’s Media 2.0 Intel newsletter)

In September of 2004, Doc Searls noted 526 “finds” in a Google search for the word “podcasting.” The creation of Dave Winer’s was just beginning to find traction with geeks back then, but, oh my, how times have changed.

A current search of the word on Google reveals 38 million finds. Not bad for just a couple of years.

But here’s something that really made me sit up and take notice. Friday night’s episode of the CBS drama NUMB3RS contained an important reference to podcasting. The bad guy was one of those religious survivalists who was on the run and communicated with his flock by, you guessed it, podcasting. I was just amazed, and I imagined people in living rooms around the country shaking their heads and saying, “Martha, what did he say? What the hell is ‘podcasting?’”

Good news, right? Well…

I spent some time in a web demonstration last week with the good folks at Ingeniux looking at their new podcast management tool. It’s pretty nice and should be in the CMS of any station serious about podcasting. Their business development guy, David Hillis, told me that only about 20% of podcasts are actually downloaded for use in a player. That means the term is basically interchangeable with on-demand streaming, and that’s not what it was originally intended to be.

And so it goes…

While it comes with a question mark, Newsweek has proclaimed 2007 as the Year of the Widget. A widget is a small piece of code that allows a user to draw material from other websites onto his or her own site or application.

User-generated content was a hallmark of 2006. It’s a fair bet 2007 will be all about further customizing your online life.

This is an accurate forecast, and the article (must read, BTW) does a good job of telling the world all about widgets and personalized web pages. Any local media company that isn’t already in the widget business is late to the show.

Already, portals like Google and Yahoo! offer customizable pages. Want to see a calendar, learn a new word-of-the-day and check local windsurfing conditions all from your homepage? No problem, you have thousands of widgets to choose from. And the fact that they’re so intuitive has made the features very popular. “The Google personal homepage is the fastest-growing Google product,” says Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president of “search products and user experience.” “This market is going to be very large.”

While some large media companies have created customizable start pages, the jury’s still out as to whether this is a smart strategy. There are two inherent problems. One, for all the content major media companies can create, it just can’t compete with the big portals. Two, even if the page allows users to import information from competing media, it still carries the brand of a 1.0 media company.

I still think that branded RSS readers are a strategic option, but widgets make even more sense for content companies.

The article notes, however, that this may not be what media companies are seeking, because they are married to old advertising mechanics. Newsweek wisely turns to Steve Rubel, because Steve has been saying that the end of the page view as the central web advertising metric is at hand, and I tend to agree with that.

If you read a local news story through the Google Reader, for example, the local paper will not register the hit. This could create skittishness among some content providers. “Media companies love to promote how many page views their properties get,” writes Rubel. “They’ve used the data to build equity. They will fight it tooth and nail to protect it, perhaps by not embracing interactive technologies as quickly as they should.”

This is not to say that you can’t measure widget traffic. It just requires attaching different types of marketing.

Purina put its name on a weather widget–to let users know if it’s nice enough outside to take Spot out for walkies–that was downloaded more than 15,000 times in its first two months. This may seem like a paltry audience for two months of advertising. But consider the fact that the Purina logo now sits on every one of those 15,000 desktops, smack in the users’ line of sight. “It’s better than advertising,” says Om Malik. “It’s in front of your eyes constantly; that brand becomes your brand.”

The trick is in getting those with their own websites or mySpace pages, for example, to use the widgets that are provided. Here is where we must be smart enough to think Long Tail instead of mass marketing, and create the widest possible range of widgets for use by people in the community.

We have so much to learn from the real web.

Simply brilliant.

From a New York Times article about Brian Stelter and his wonderful TVNewser blog comes this outrageous quote from a high-level broadcast executive:

“The whole industry pays attention to his blog,” said Jeffrey W. Schneider, a senior vice president of ABC News. “It would not surprise me if I refreshed my browser 30 to 40 times a day.”

Obviously, Mr. Schneider has NEVER HEARD OF RSS and is living in ancient web history! I mean, who refreshes a browser anymore? Hello!

I find it amazing how many mainstream media people run from RSS and use the excuse “nobody knows what it is.” There’s a wonderful DirectTV ad with Jessica Simpson in her Dukes of Hazard role where the character says, “…it’s available in 1080i. I don’t even know what that is, but I want it.” If the industry can teach people about high definition terms, surely it can teach people about RSS.