"Unaware RSS users " vs "aware RSS users"

The whitepaper makes a strong distinction between "Unaware RSS Users" and "Aware RSS Users", positioning the "Unaware" batch as the mainstream Internet population.

This makes it absolutely clear that B2C marketers, targeting consumers, should take special care to promote their feeds using "friendly" subscribe buttons.

On the other hand, if targeting a more tech-savvy audience, going the way of "RSS" and more complex RSS reading tools might be a better choice. This might also prove more effective for targeting executives and other corporate target audiences that might be using an enterprise-wide RSS solution, such as NewsGator.

Consumption levels

The whitepaper says that on the average "Aware RSS Users" subscribe to 6.6 feeds. The consequences of this are not as simple as they might seem. Even "RSS Aware" users do not subscribe to "just anything" and seems they only subscribe or keep being subscribed to the content of highest relevance to them.

The message for marketers is to become even more relevant and more focused on providing real value for their target audiences. RSS does not mean that end-users will start consuming that much more online content, but simply that their primary consumption channel will change. It's up to you to make place for yourself in this consumption channel, but you can only do so if you become one of the key targeted content providers for your market and can deliver consistently high-quality content.

Types of RSS content consumed

Even in the world of RSS, mainstream media rules, with World news and National news both leading the pack at 52% and followed by Entertainment at 34% and Weather ad 31%.

If we take a look at what lies beneath this we can see that end-users still see RSS as a news consumption tool and a tool to receive time-sensitive updates, such as weather info.

The interesting part is that blogs achieve only 23% and although they are gaining quickly are still not part of the mainstream. Whichever way you look at this, the real long tail is still far from fruition. There are two are interesting categories listed in the report: investment/financial info/banking at 13% and Shopping/online commerce at 10%.

The popularity of these two shows that RSS in fact is appropriate for delivering business info and that RSS can be used for e-commerce. A strong case in point urging e-retailers to start providing RSS feeds.

Why end-users use RSS

"RSS Aware" end-users subscribe to feed because of "ease" or "convenience", followed by being able to choose what they read. To marketers, these three should be the founding stones of how to get their visitors to adopt RSS.

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