Guest post by Phil Hollows (@phollows), CEO of FeedBlitz

Last week, my company, FeedBlitz, announced an innovative ad program for RSS feeds and social media, powered by LiveIntent’s email ad serving and optimization platform. Together, LiveIntent and FeedBlitz have extended the award-winning email ad solution into a novel area: RSS feeds.

RSS feeds – the machine readable form of your content marketing updates – have in the past been poorly served by ad platforms. The only player of note in the broad RSS ad market until recently was Google, which had offered “AdSense for Feeds” as a monetization option through FeedBurner. Google neglected that product, it performed poorly, and ultimately it was shuttered for good last week. In response to the opportunity presented by Google’s exit, FeedBlitz has decided to expand its business to serve abandoned bloggers who still need revenue generating tools.

Feedblitz, well positioned to pick up where Google left off, has specialized in enabling content marketers to reach their audience via email and RSS feeds, and has been a LiveIntent strategic partner since 2011.

One of the joys about partnering with LiveIntent is the creativity and responsiveness of the account, technical and management teams. This felt like a terrific opportunity for the entire space. Working together over a few weeks, Feedblitz extended LiveIntent’s publisher-side solution and integrated it with FeedBlitz’s RSS feed service. The result: A drop-in monetization alternative for blog publishers and advertisers who had otherwise been completely abandoned by Google. Going live the same day that “AdSense for Feeds” finally shut down, the FeedBlitz RSS ad service, powered by LiveIntent, generates up to 3x as much revenue for publishers as the Google AdSense product it replaces.

“We love what Feedblitz is bringing to blogging and RSS. Partners who are solving universal problems fit in with LiveIntent’s own mission of bringing the innovations of web display advertising to the email ecosystem. Adding Blogs and RSS to the mix is the logical next step” – Matt Keiser, LiveIntent CEO.

But still, RSS: Why bother? Well, to start with, the human audience for RSS feeds in an RSS reader is often a site’s most sophisticated audience – exactly the kind of people advertisers want to reach most. Some technical publications see a third of their site’s page views coming directly from RSS feeds, meaning millions of monthly potential ad impressions to a dream audience are now available to advertisers and generating income for publishers via FeedBlitz and LiveIntent.

Better yet, though, RSS feeds are the technical glue that enables content marketers to distribute their work to third party sites and social networks. RSS functions as the upstream content source; every other content platform – including email – is downstream. So, if you have an ad in that RSS feed, it calls “shotgun!” and comes along for the ride.

In other words, using LiveIntent and FeedBlitz together, you can place ads upstream of every online platform, reaching your widest possible audience, with a single, elegant solution. Advertisers get the biggest bank for their buck, and publishers see dramatically increased earnings as their monetizable audience blossoms.

To reach FeedBlitz’s RSS audience, contact your LiveIntent account manager. To set up your RSS feed for monetization – and a whole lot more – you can contact me directly on Twitter (@phollows) or via email (phil at feedblitz dot com). Or simply start a trial today – sign up is available from the FeedBlitz.com home page. 

About Phil Hollows

Phil Hollows is the Founder and CEO of FeedBlitz, the innovative social media and email marketing automation service, and the author of “List Building for Bloggers.” Powering daily updates for Seth Godin, Jay Baer, Fred Wilson and over 100,000 other sites, FeedBlitz is the premium FeedBurner alternative. Learn more at FeedBlitz.com