Kanoodle said yesterday that it struck a distribution deal with news aggregator Feedster to sprinkle paid listings in Feedster's feeds of search results.
The deal expands the reach of Kanoodle's content listings program, called ContextTarget. Kanoodle also distributes its content listings to partners such as CBS MarketWatch and MSNBC.com.
Feedster, San Francisco, which indexes more than 8,000 news sources, lets users have their searches sent to them through the Really Simple Syndication feed. Feedster already displays paid search listings on its Web site through Yahoo's Overture Services. Its search feeds will include Kanoodle's ContextTarget listings labeled as advertisements.
Feedster will offer its users the option of paying $10 per year, via PayPal, to receive an ad-free RSS feed.
RSS feeds, which stream news headlines and other chunks of content to users, are one of a number of new distribution vehicles seen for paid listings beyond search pages. Since Google began its contextual paid listings program, AdSense, 16 months ago, paid listings have popped up next to e-mail messages, in adware programs and even in the text of news stories.
The impetus for the expansion is the maturing of the search market. A Jupiter Research forecast for the search market released this month concluded that most of the industry's growth would come from price increases, since supply continues to lag demand for search listings.
“We believe content is a real solution to the supply problem,” said Mark Josephson, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Kanoodle. “We really view RSS as an extension of content.”
Kanoodle, Amherst, NY, has experimented with a few other RSS implementations, including with CBS MarketWatch and Moreover Technologies. Josephson said early results showed RSS paid listings perform slightly better than standard content listings.
