By Charlene Li

One of the biggest barriers to RSS becoming a viable advertising medium is the lack of standard metrics. SyndicateIQ Syndicate IQ took the wraps off of its service this week, and I think it’s worth investigating. I spoke with CEO/founder Stuart Watson last month about their plans.

Similar to Feedburner and Pheedo, Syndicate IQ can track the number of subscribers to a feed. But it also assigns a unique URL to every RSS article,  which aids in tracking not only an IP address, but also specific browsers. So it can track if a user at a specific computer opens an article within 24 hours, thereby tracking actual daily circulation of an article. This is essential to publishers like newspapers who typically look at daily readership, in addition to overall subscriptions.

Syndicate IQ’s goal is to work closely with publishers who not only want to monetize RSS feeds with ads, but to also potentially differentiate the ads to individual users based on their demographics and behavior. For example, the publisher may send a site-registered user different ad content, based on what that publisher knows about that user’s location, profile, or browsing habits.

The company is also planning to create an RSS ad network, similar to what Pheedo and RSSAds have in place. Stuart talked about the need for companies like his, Feedburner, Pheedo, and RSSAds to work together with the IAB to set standards for the display and measurement of RSS ads. This is a great idea, especially for “old-timers” who may recall the chaos that accompanied the early years of the commercial Web.

Update: I misspelled Syndicate IQ's name in the original post -- there is a space that I had overlooked.