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September 25, 2006

TechMeme Invents New Kind of Advertisment

Michael Arrington

35 comments »

TechMeme (formerly tech.memeorandum) is a site that bloggers and others check frequently for news. It is an entirely automated web service that looks at what bloggers are talking about, and linking to, and decides what is news based on that analysis. In many ways it is an anti-Digg. Humans have no say in what appears on the TechMeme homepage, other than by blogging about it.

TechMeme is focused on technology news. It, along with sister sites Memeorandum (politics), WeSmirch (celebrity gossip) and BallBug (baseball news), is one of the more important technical innovations that has come out of the new web.

Tonight Gabe Rivera, the founder of TechMeme, just invented something else - advertisements delivered via RSS. NOT advertisements embedded withing RSS feeds, but actually using RSS as the delivery mechanism.

You can see the initial ads, which are for sale on TechMeme (details here), in the right sidebar on the home page of the site. The ads are also shown in the image to the left.

Advertisers send the ad to Techmeme via RSS (typically this would come from a blog, but any content would work). If the advertiser wants to change the ad, they simply change the RSS content.

Gabe explains his new ad unit in more detail on his blog here. I also like to get Jeff Jarvis’ opinion on new advertising models - it’s an area he’s become an expert in. His verdict? Thumbs up (and he wants them on his own site).

Our previous posts on TechMeme and Memeorandum are here.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, September 25th, 2006 at 6:35 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. Peter Cooper

    September 25th, 2006 at 7:14 am

    I set up something that’s the other way around from this for a major Web hosting company about 18 months ago. Basically they wanted to push their adverts over RSS to their affiliates’ sites automatically.. so the affiliates could paste some PHP or JavaScript code to their site and the hosting company could simply update an RSS file for the current ad / offer / promotion to update for the affiliate :)

    So.. good idea, and very interesting to see it round this way.

  2. NeoTechie

    September 25th, 2006 at 7:17 am

    This is just the beginning. New methods will change the face of advertising, as we know it. Innovative companies tend to be successful.
    Keep an eye on Google in the coming months.

  3. Frank Cefalu

    September 25th, 2006 at 7:35 am

    Seriously, the name Tech Meme is just annoying. Not a good name for a tech site in my opinion. And thats probably the reason I never visited the site either…..

    =/

  4. Frank Cefalu

    September 25th, 2006 at 7:38 am

    Are there 10 advertisements on your site now Mike? Damn

  5. Sean

    September 25th, 2006 at 8:04 am

    The ads are getting a bit overbearing (at least when I am forced to use IE - Firefox blocks most of them), but considering the going price for one of those 125×125 squares is $10K/month, I can understand that he would add some more if there was demand. :)

  6. eas

    September 25th, 2006 at 8:15 am

    Huh, This is new? Haven’t content companies been paying to get headlines and blurbs of their content published on other content companies web sites for years?

    What’s new about this? That it uses RSS, rather than some proprietary syndication format? No Digg.

  7. Michael Arrington

    September 25th, 2006 at 9:11 am

    eas - luckily this isn’t digg. :-)

  8. Jitendra

    September 25th, 2006 at 9:44 am

    Very cool…I wonder how they set the price though, given that they have limited slots…It might be a good idea to do some sort of dynamic optimization (like Google) with advertizers bidding on line and Techmeme deciding the order of to display based on number of clicks.

  9. James Cox

    September 25th, 2006 at 11:12 am

    nice idea, but it’ll need security and moderation, otherwise any old spammer can send their wares via rss to the site…

  10. Kevin Burton

    September 25th, 2006 at 11:34 am

    Hey… my one comment is to just not sell the links directly. Use rel=nofollow to avoid sponsors who want to buy pagerank.

    http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog.....05874.html

    and

    http://kalsey.com/2006/06/are_text_link_ads_spam/

    cover this area and explain why this is equivalent to Google spam.

    I’m sure this is just an oversight though and not intentional. It’s really easy to forget this stuff… Tailrank’s link sponsorship experiment used nofollow …..

    Best of luck!

    Kevin

  11. Adam Kalsey

    September 25th, 2006 at 12:08 pm

    Pheedo’s been doing this for some time with PR Web . PR Web provides feeds that are converted to ads that Pheedo publishers can use on their sites and in their own feeds. The “innovation” that Gabe has is that the ad feeds come from multiple sources. That’s something that Pheedo tried out, and may have actually launched in a widespread manner at some point — although I can find no mention of it on their site now.

    Pheedo also has the reverse of this. In addition to the standard Javascript and other ad delivery options, publishers can get an RSS feed of ads and then integrate those ads however they want.

    Disclosure: I was a founder of Pheedo and although I no longer am with the company, I still own stock.

  12. Mike Rundle

    September 25th, 2006 at 1:09 pm

    Haha, love the Digg comment Mike. Totally priceless!

  13. John Roberts

    September 25th, 2006 at 1:43 pm

    Mike, Gabe and his sites are great.

    Still, I don’t think you don’t need to overstate the case. This is not an invention or innovation. I hope it’s very successful for Gabe, and other publishers and aggregation sites. After all, we all benefit from smart advertising, where smart = doesn’t annoy readers and accomplishes advertiser goals (whether branding or more). But delivery via RSS is hardly new.

    CNET has offered RSS for updating ads on its sites since March, and as the two articles about that offering below show, others have experimented in this manner earlier.

    http://www.marketingvox.com/ar....._ad_units/

    http://www.adweek.com/aw/iq_in.....1002157756

    Cheers.

  14. Klaus

    September 25th, 2006 at 2:30 pm

    And there is really no legal problem with displaying ads against original content sourced from other sites?

    This is a serious question.

    Is the consensus that it is only illegal to display ads against full feeds?

  15. Jeremy Pepper

    September 25th, 2006 at 2:45 pm

    Think he should have done WeSmirch first. Just my .02.

  16. PJ

    September 25th, 2006 at 3:31 pm

    FeedSense.com

    You’re welcome.

  17. Michael

    September 25th, 2006 at 5:42 pm

    I don’t think the concept is so new either. I’ve been running ads (which just happen to only be text links) via RSS on my blog since February.

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    September 30th, 2006 at 5:40 am

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  19. XRumer320

    October 3rd, 2006 at 3:05 am

    Hack again?!

  20. Kristy A Coghlan

    October 6th, 2006 at 10:28 am

    Thank you for the link.

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