RSS and Advertising

There's another, middle ground that could keep both parties reasonably happy, and some of the Weblogs folk have already been sharing their thoughts about it here:

http://www.intuitive.com/blog/ads_in_rss_feeds_corrupting_the_idea_of_information_syndication.html

Personally, I don't have a problem with ads in feeds -- as long as it's handled in a way that suits both the target audience and the real content of the feed.

Thanks for raising this issue here. You've inspired me to begin a public effort to draft reasonable, flexible suggested guidelines for feed publishers who are considering inserting ads in their feeds.

See: http://snipurl.com/emyl

Thanks!

- Amy Gahran
Editor, CONTENTIOUS

Dave hits it on the head.
If I get the full feed (I usually don't like those) it means I get to read everything in that post/article and won't go to the site so I'm ok with ads there (within reason). But, I prefer a feed with just a headline and summary. On those, ads are totally annoying and I will dump that feed. On these, entice me with a good compelling head and I will visit your site and support your advertising there.

I don't think that users savvy enough to be reading feeds will be clicking on ads in feeds. Maybe it will be a better revenue option when feeds become a more mainstream phenomenon. Embedded ads like Slashdot's might be the way to go, as opposed to isolated links to ads.

Bob Wyman - CTO at PubSub - has a great post on RSS advertisement and its problems/opportunities:

"Personally, I believe that there should be no question that bloggers have the right to insert ads in their content without fearing that aggregators will "strip" those ads. I strongly feel that suggestions that such stripping might be reasonable (as in Dave Winer's recent post) are both irresponsible and wrong-headed. However, advertisers should not be surprised by such suggestions if they insist of creating ads in the incredibly irresponsible manner in which these DoubleClick ads have been created."

I am not sure if html is enabled on comments, but you may want to link this post to his comments at Bob Wyman's comment on RSS ads.

If ads become too pervasive in web feeds, presumably a "TiVo" for skipping ads in web feeds will become a certainty.

-- Jack Krupansky

I agree. I think that if advertisers push it too far, people will come up with some kind of tech workaround to deal with it. They have the tools in their hands nowadays, luckily!

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