RSS ad network Pheedo will announce a new service tonight - advertising widgets powered by RSS and incorporating several social media tools. Readers familiar with Techmeme’s advertising program will recognize the ideas here - companies today are producing creative content to drive visitors to their websites and that content can be leveraged explicitly as advertising. Pheedo hopes to make this approach scalable and widely deployed. The widgets can be placed on any web page and in many other ad networks.
It’s a gamble, but it could prove a very smart one if the advertising world picks up the pace on producing compelling social media content.
The widgets, live examples of which can be seen on the Pheedo home page, can be populated by any RSS feed. Items in the feed are followed by buttons to tag those items in third party social bookmarking sites of the advertiser’s choice. Opera ad items in Pheedo, for example, can be tagged in Furl, Del.icio.us, Digg or Technorati - Expedia ads can be tagged in Del.icio.us, Reddit or Google Bookmarks. Any of the items can be emailed from inside the widget.
Video feeds can be served up in the widget as well, for now a linked thumbnail is displayed.
Do you often see advertising content you want to tag into Reddit or Digg? The first obstacle Pheedo will face is that few of its advertisers are likely to produce sufficiently compelling content to make those tagging buttons (and perhaps the whole widget) appear legitimate. It’s a great vision - advertisers joining conversations in an intelligent, creative way. Perhaps we’ll see it happen more in the future.
Opera is an interesting example, Pheedo says they’ve got 1000 subscribers to their ad widget’s feed after a month of testing. That’s impressive. If an increasing number of companies can start producing such desirable advertising content online - Pheedo’s ad widget could be well positioned to provide the infrastructure for that market shift.
As an upcoming blogger I can see the benefits of it by earning real cash and having relavant advertisements (based on RSS) for my blog. Read this on their website ‘Solutions for Publishers’:
“Already have a feed management service?
No problem. Pheedo’s world-class RSS ad server is compatible with leading feed management and blogging services, including Feedburner, MovableType, Typepad, Wordpress and Expression Engine. Custom configuration with other platforms is as simple as giving us a call.”
Thats nice! Got their base covered. Can’t see why it can’t be the next Adsense for Blogs!
I can see why it won’t be the next AdSense…I went to sign-up.
They asked for my Feed Type, Text, Audio, or Video
My RSS feed contains all 3 types, and they don’t have any provision for that, so to me it means that they don’t really understand the industry or the fact that it is already difficult enough to get people to subscribe to your feed while it only contains valid ad-free content.
Alex, thanks for the thoughtful comment. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Yes, we understand a feed has Text, Audio or Video in one feed. We’ll have that covered soon. Stay tuned for further features. Great feedback.
And, the unit is not a widget but could easily be. Widgets are not ready for tracking by the likes of DoubleClick and others. This product was built for marketers. We are bridging the gap between how marketers work today (ad serving and tracking while relying on iframes/javascript tags to deliver ads on websites) and how they might deliver ads in the future (widgets). This ad unit could easily be turned into an official widget when that time comes.
Thanks fo covering the story, Marshall.
Cheers,
Bill Flitter
Pheedo
Pheedo is a great company with great employees. I hope everyone supports them and uses their products. [Or at least give them honestly constructive criticism]
I’ll definitely give it a shot, although I don’t know how useful it will be. Only one way to find out, right? Good lookin’ out Marshall.
We launched an RSS-powered
LiveLink ad unit a few weeks ago and are so far seeing clickthrus 3 to 10 times the norm. But Digging ads? I sense a great outsourcing opportunity in India.
We are also looking forward to it !!
Their are too many widgets now crowding your blogs…not enough room for MORE useless space takers!
so what do they call pheedo users? pheedophiles?
Alex, the ability to work with a feed that contains, text, video or audio content went live this evening. If you go back to Pheedo.com, you will see it added as an option on the drop down menu.
Thanks!
Bill Flitter
Pheedo
What is your plan for dealing with overseas advertisers and publishers?
nice job bill! only 7 hours and you fix it!!!
and you used free feedback provided trough techcrunch… nice job techcruch!!!
I had to point out, it sounds like fido… a cellular carrier in canada
the one I use hehe. fido.ca is their site if you dont belive me 
test?
Not sure this is anything new. buzztracker.com was running rss powered ads just like this even before techmeme, and feedburner has been running these for months.
Congratulations on the launch!
We are happy to see others prosper in the advertising industry and if we can be of any assistance with the advancement of your widget development, contact our business development staff. We are currently structuring partnerships with Web 2.0 companies seeking widget based advertising.
The evolution of internet Advertising Industry is upon us.
Once again congrats Pheedo!
TEAM SOCIALPAY
http://socialpay.com
COMPANY INFO
SocialPAY is an advertising widget developer & distributor, which serves both the users of our advertising widgets, and the websites they assemble in. In short, we provide internet users with entertaining & interactive user generated advertising widgets for use within their blogs, social networks and web pages.
Maybe I’m just going blind, but the small text at the bottom looks exactly like “ASS MARKETING SOLUTIONS”
This is a pretty innovative idea, and I think it could succeed - especially in the area where it is a product or service that requires some technical expertise. For example, if I was reading articles on storage arrays I would definetly love to see a list of white papers from various companies (e.g. IBM, Dell, Sun, HP, LeftHandNetworks, etc.) on why their product is the best.