Comments on: Advertising in RSS

By: InfoWorld Adds Ads To Its RSS Feeds

InfoWorld Adds Ads To Its RSS Feeds — Sun, 08 Feb 2004 03:12:27 +0000

Phil Windly responds to Dave Winer's post noting that Infoworld is now the first publisher to include ads in its RSS feed ....[more]

By: Advertising in RSS

Advertising in RSS — Mon, 04 Aug 2003 22:09:55 +0000

The NewsGator team are soliciting advice about Advertising in RSS.

Web pages have developed pop-ups, email has spam and now it seems RSS is to have advertisements. Pop-ups and spam are not opt-in services. In many cases they aren't even opt-out. RSS at the moment has no mechanism to identify which posts are advertisments and which are not. It is opt-in, all-in.

If NewsGator leads the way in putting advertisements into RSS feeds then they are also beautifully positioned to make them an opt-in service from day 1. An extension to RSS that marks a post as advertisement means they can be easily filtered out. The other, more insidious, alternative is the change in policy. "By agreeing to take this feed you...".

Many of the feeds I subscribe to are personal and so are unlikely to carry advertisements yet I'm still uncomfortable with the idea unless I am given a choice up front. [thought horizon]

That choice is your decision to subscribe or not. A weblogger will do well to balance his content with advertising, lest the signal-to-noise ratio fall too low. Get over it, it's gonna happen...

...[more]

By: Martin

Martin — Mon, 16 Jun 2003 20:38:40 +0000

This is not a great idea. RSS is often bring me to a site to see the full article. This is where and when I would expect advertisement. Personally I see this as SPAM.

Can these ads be filtered out? I recommend this be added to tools like SharpReader and NewsGator.

By: Martin

Martin — Mon, 16 Jun 2003 20:38:22 +0000

This is not a great idea. RSS is often bring me to a site to see the full article. This is where and when I would expect advertisement. Personally I see this as SPAM.

Can these ads be filtered out? I recommend this be added to tools like SharpReader and NewsGator.

By: Gordon Weakliem

Gordon Weakliem — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 19:23:10 +0000

A couple more
Jenny Levine:
http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/2003/06/12.html#a4114

Phil Windley:
http://www.windley.com/2003/06/13.html#a675

By: Dwight Shih

Dwight Shih — Fri, 13 Jun 2003 16:21:19 +0000

I'm not so wild about the implementation. I think that the ad is too large relative to the content. More here.

By: Greg Reinacker

Greg Reinacker — Thu, 12 Jun 2003 16:39:42 +0000

Dave Winer isn't a fan of this...

By: Greg Reinacker

Greg Reinacker — Thu, 12 Jun 2003 16:37:43 +0000

A post from Sam Ruby and more comments here.

By: Greg Reinacker

Greg Reinacker — Thu, 12 Jun 2003 15:08:14 +0000

A couple more comments on this:

http://www.technosponge.com/archives/000235.html

http://radio.weblogs.com/0118153/2003/06/12.html

By: John S.

John S. — Thu, 12 Jun 2003 03:23:15 +0000

I really don’t mind the ads any more than I really mind website banner ads or TV commercials. If the advertisement intrigues me, I may wish to get more information on the product. If not, I can simply ignore the ad altogether.

As long as the use of ads doesn’t become too personally intrusive (e.g. tracking cookies, popups, Flash ads…), I merely see them as another viable revenue stream to keep the actual product (in this case, the RSS feed) alive.