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RSS feeds have long been a location for advertisement for commercial products or services. We have also seen the arrival of feed powered ads where the content of an advert – generally in widget format – hosted on a website is provided via an RSS feed.

A good example is the feed-powered advertising model on Gabe Rivera’s popular news tracking site Techmeme.

Although not new at the time (CNET, nooked, Pheedo, Feedburner and others had done this before) this concept has become increasingly utilized on the Web because it offers the advertiser a level of control over the advertisement content that is not possible via other advertising systems.

A benefit of RSS-powered ads is that the advertiser can update their advert at any point, to respond to new product inventory or address a particular issue – or perhaps just to become part of the online conversation.

Fred Wilson, had this to say on feed powered advertising

Here is why feed powered ads are so great. The ad unit simply is a mini feed reader. The advertiser retains real time control of what goes into the ad. They simply update their feed and the ad changes. And it brings advertising and content closer together.

next up – early examples of feedcommerce