Wilson has been getting about three times the number of RSS requests for his blog as he gets page views. He's been running contextually targeted Google AdSense ads on his site; he recently implemented a new service from FeedBurner that inserts contextually targeted Overture ads into his RSS feeds and measures feed "views." Incredibly, after only three days of testing, he discovered the effective clicks and revenue yield from Overture ads in RSS views were almost equal to his AdSense page views. In other words, using a new technology to insert and measure ads and audience, he can monetize his existing RSS readers at a rate that should double his total online ad revenue. Over three days, Wilson's blog had 7,450 page views. For those same days, RSS views on his FeedBurner feed were 7,350. These RSS views account for only 30 percent of his total RSS subscribers because, as with many blogs, his RSS views are three times his Web page views. During those days, he had 36 AdSense click-through from his Web pages. He had 10 Overture clicks from his RSS feeds. If similar ads were inserted in the other 70 percent of his RSS feeds, they would very likely produce total click-through numbers that approximated his Web page yield. Wilson's AdSense ads are optimized for his pages (they've been running for over a year). His Overture ads haven't yet been optimized for his feeds, since this is the first time they ran. Wilson is now able to generate revenue from his RSS feeds, plus he has real visibility into the audience he's attracting. He can determine how many people actually view his RSS feeds, rather than just how many feeds were sent, which was all he could do before. This is big. Wilson's blog is tiny, and his experiment is by no means scientifically and methodologically bulletproof. But it's very likely to be directionally accurate. If the new RSS delivery, ad insertion, and tracking tools from companies such as FeedBurner and Syndicate IQ can work at this level, and as RSS usage continues to grow this will quickly become a big market. Traffic is already there. Ads are already there. Now, it appears, the tools are there as well. This is a hot space to watch. It won't be the next coming of search. It won't even be the next coming of commercial e-mail or rich media. It will, however, become an important supplemental revenue stream to a lot of content owners and small publishers, particularly bloggers, where it's quite common three-quarters or more of their audiences use RSS feeds, rather than the Web pages, to view content.