Virurl’s plans to rev­o­lu­tion­ize online adver­tis­ing by ditch­ing ban­ner ads and engag­ing con­sumers through live­ly and amus­ing con­tent just got anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant step clos­er, thanks to the launch of a new “RSS Ads” feature.

The San­ta Mon­i­ca-based start­up says that the new facil­i­ty will enable pub­lish­ers to pro­mote videos and arti­cles much more eas­i­ly through its plat­form. Essen­tial­ly, RSS Ad refash­ions arti­cles into ads. As soon as a new arti­cle arrives in a publisher’s RSS feed, the fea­ture sets about auto­mat­i­cal­ly refig­ur­ing it as an ad, where­upon, as the company’s name sug­gests, it “goes viral”. In oth­er words, it gets pro­mot­ed via the con­tent wid­get appear­ing on all of Virurl’s part­ner sites, and Virurl’s paid social influ­encers (who gain their remu­ner­a­tion by shar­ing Virurl con­tent) will also dis­sem­i­nate it.

Boost­ing those clickthroughs

Fran­cis­co Diaz-Mit­o­ma, the startup’s co-founder said that his firm’s new fea­ture lets the cre­ative tal­ent at online adver­tis­ing agen­cies – copy­writ­ers and art direc­tors notably – to “stay focused on what they do best — cre­at­ing valu­able content.”

RSS Ads will, Virurl con­fi­dent­ly asserts, increase click­through rates by enabling pub­lish­ers to pro­mote more con­tent. And giv­en that, since its 2011 launch, Virurl has been cho­sen to dis­sem­i­nate 4 mil­lion sto­ries (3 mil­lion of which took place in the last half year alone), accu­mu­lat­ing a grow­ing tal­ly of part­ner sites and social influ­encers in the process, that trans­lates into an awful lot of click­throughs, potentially.

But what’s so dif­fer­ent about Virurl in the con­tent-to-ad space?

Virurl has attract­ed an impres­sive list of pub­lish­ers who now use it to pro­mote their con­tent.  Names include Style­Cast­er, Fun­ny or Die, VICE and Sports Illus­trat­ed. But hard-nosed account man­agers may be won­der­ing what sets Viurl apart in an increas­ing­ly crowd­ed mar­ket­place – it’s by no means the only agency promis­ing to trans­mute con­tent into ads. OneSpot joined the grow­ing con­tent-to-ad crowd just this month.

Diaz-Mit­o­ma believes that Virurl’s unique sell­ing point is that its ad units are so com­plete­ly cus­tomiz­able. He said:

“Virurl’s tools cou­pled with our high qual­i­ty con­tent net­work allows our pub­lish­ers and adver­tis­ers to get as close as pos­si­ble to the ‘native adver­tis­ing’ unicorn.”

Clear­ly, he’s get­ting some­thing right: Virurl raised an impres­sive $1.2 mil­lion in seed fund­ing in 2012.