Mike Arrington breathlessly proclaims that Gabe Rivera has “invented a new form of advertising” by displaying items from sponsors RSS feeds on his “A-list” digesting site, Techmeme.

Tonight Gabe Rivera, the founder of TechMeme, just invented something else – advertisements delivered via RSS. NOT advertisements embedded withing RSS feeds, but actually using RSS as the delivery mechanism.
TechMeme Invents New Kind of Advertisment

How is this new? Every content site with any sort of traffic and leverage in the 90s had a section with headlines linking to content from sponsors paying for “distribution.”

Jeff Jarvis, over on Buzz Machine, chooses a similar headline, calling it A New Kind of Advertising. He suggests that what’s unique about this is that:

[It’s] dynamic advertising controlled by the advertisers, who will make their ads — their content — relevant to the readers who see their feeds on Techmeme

Again, how is this unique? You think that the companies that were paying news.com, etc thousands of dollars for “distribution” weren’t carefully targeting the headlines they syndicated?

If anything, this brings RSS full circle. In it’s early days (on MyNetscape), RSS provided a way to do content syndication without having a business arrangement in place. Gabe continues to exploit this use of RSS to gain content for his site. Now he’s also using it to take paid content. Good for Gabe. Otherwise, big whoop.

Update: I do give Gabe credit for applying an existing technology and business model in a slightly new context. Someone had to be the first to do it. It’s not Gabe’s fault that people who should know better can’t take a 30 second break from their hyping reporting to provide some historical context.