RSS Data You Can Use From Pheedo

I'll be speaking with the folks at the Pheedo RSS Advertising network at Ad:tech next week and was looking over their Pheedo Read Spring 2006 Whitepaper, a great whitepaper which reveals some key findings about the current state of RSS and weblog marketing and advertising. The following data should be of immense interest to publisher/bloggers.

Full Feeds vs Summary Feeds
The debate rages on over whether publishers and bloggers should produce partial or full text feeds of the content. Pheedo has reviewed the readership and click-through rates (CTR) of the top fifty RSS feeds in its publisher network and found that the average click-through rates are nearly identical for full and summary feeds.

Most Publishers Opt for Summary Feeds
84% of the feeds sampled for this report were summary feeds. While this may appear to be a relatively small sample size at 50 feeds, it is representative of an average feed consumer. According to data from Bloglines, the average Bloglines user tracks more than 20 news feeds. It appears that a majority of publishers are publishing in summary format.

Bloglines and MyYahoo! Drive Feed Reading Consumption Experience
Bloglines - 30%, YahooFeedSeeker (MyYahoo) - 18%, Mozilla -14%, NewsGatorOnline - 10%, NetNewsWire - 4%, Others - 24%

RSS Ad Click-Through Normalizes; Standalone Ads Still Best Performing
The average CTR of a standalone RSS ad is 2.76%
The average CTR of an inline RSS ad is .45%

Content Category and Vertical Market Influence RSS Ad Performance
The "content category" plays a significant role in the performace of RSS and publishing efforts and RSS advertising campaigns. The top three performing content categories for RSS advertising are Comics and Humor (9.62%), Travel (8.54%) and Kids/Family (7.61%). On the other end of the spectrum, the poorest performing (in terms of click-through rate) are consumer technology (1.04%), politics (1.40%) and computer hardware (1.85%).