ThankYouPages RSS Interstitial Overview

Taking advantage of our existing ad inventory and ThankYouPages functionality, we are pleased to announce our RSS Interstitials version of ThankYouPages.

RSS Interstitials allow you to monetize your feed traffic by introducing fully branded advertising between your feed links and the content on your site. As with our all of our Focalex products, you still control the look, feel, and format of the page, as well as how often offers appear to your user. Interested in using RSS Interstitials on your feed? Need to know more about RSS? Read below.

• What is RSS?
• How can I make money from my RSS feed?
• How does RSS benefit the user?
• How does RSS benefit the publisher?
• How can I create an RSS feed?
• How can I read an RSS feed?
• Can I use your product in conjunction with other RSS advertising programs?
• How can I get started using RSS Interstitials?
• Other RSS information resources?

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a format for providing the content of your web site in a file (a "feed" or "web feed") that can be easily parsed and eventually accessed by others. Creating an RSS feed allows you to syndicate the content of your web site, either directly to your audience or to other web sites. For example, your readers could easily receive updated content by subscribing to your RSS Feed and then reading it using a "feed reader". Additionally, other web sites could also take these feeds and integrate them into their site, providing them with an interesting site addition, and providing you greater distribution for your content.

Currently, there are very few RSS monetization options. One frequently seen option is to include advertisements as feed entries. These offers appear in the same format as news updates and generally get overlooked immediately by surfers. Other options include the insertion of inline ads directly into RSS entries, or the addition of contextual keyword advertising, which is similar to the keyword advertising shown in the sidebars of many sites. Conversion on these types of ads, and the resulting earnings are often tepid at best.

Focalex, offers a different approach. Taking advantage of our existing ad inventory, and ThankYouPages functionality, we have created a hybrid product called RSS Interstitials that allows publishers to insert advertising into the links contained within their RSS feeds. When a user clicks a link from your RSS feed, they will are shown a short, fully branded, interstitial advertisement between the click of the link, and the final destination. As is the case with our existing ThankYouPages implementations, the creation of these links, as well as how often and where they appear, is all controlled on the publisher side from within the ThankYouPages console

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The returns have been very positive and have outperformed the other alternatives available. In addition, our offers rarely drive traffic away from your site unlike some of the other options available.

To see the RSS Interstitials in action, simply add this feed to your feed reader:

http://focalex.com/rss/12_preloader.xml

When clicking the links contained within the feed, you should see a short interstitial ad before reaching the content. Please note that the frequency of ad display is currently set to "show always" in this sample implementation. When setting up your own RSS Interstitials, you will have the ability to set the frequency of ad display to your liking.

Keeping up with many different web sites can be a bit overwhelming to say the least, and the job is not getting any easier. RSS feeds allow users to subscribe to content and receive updates from multiple sites and aggregate those subscriptions to feed reader for easy browsing all in one place. Whenever a site that the user has subscribed to is updated or content is added, subscribers are automatically notified in their feed reader and can then go to the sites to view the content.

Syndicating your site's content using RSS is an excellent way to notify your users of updates to your site without relying on email newsletters. RSS feeds give your users the power to consume your content on their terms and on their schedule, resulting in a far more loyal and responsive audience. By providing feeds for syndication to other publishers, you can also greatly increase your reach quickly and efficiently.

If you operate a blog or Content Management System (CMS) driven site such as Wordpress, Typepad, Moveable Type, Drupal, or something similar, feed creation is most likely built in. If you do not run a site that operates using these platforms, you could try building the feed yourself, or using a service such as FeedForAll.

Subscribing to feeds is simple and typically done using a piece of software called a "feed-reader". Feed readers have the ability to parse RSS feeds, and present them in human-readable format. Feed-readers are typically free and can be downloaded and installed on your desktop, or can be accessed online. If you are looking for a downloadable/installable program to read your feeds, one good choice is a product called FeedDemon. Alternatively, if you want to keep all of your feeds in an online reader, to access anywhere at anytime, Bloglines is an excellent choice.

To add a feed to your feed reader, look for links labeled "RSS" or buttons like these on the site to which you would like to subscribe.

Of course! However, you should make sure that you are not violating the terms and conditions of the other advertising programs. Given that most other RSS advertising programs are based on inserting advertisements into the feed itself rather than showing advertisements on the click of feed links, our RSS Interstitial program rarely will interfere with your existing programs.

This functionality is not yet available to all publishers so please contact us directly if interested. However the first step you would need would be to complete the ThankYouPages application process at http://www.thankyoupages.com/join_now/.

http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/aboutrss
http://www.webreference.com/authoring/languages/xml/rss/intro/
http://www.faganfinder.com/search/rss.shtml
http://blog.contentious.com/archives/2004/05/04/part-1-webfeeds-rss-whats-new-online
http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175271