RSS and Weblog Ads?

Worried About Blipverts asks: "Last week I signed up for an RSS feed from a small site and saw that ads were being inserted into content. I was somewhat surprised, even though I'd heard companies like FeedBurner and BlogMine are providing such services. I'm mixed on the subject ... on one hand, compensating webloggers financially is a powerful way to demonstrate the power of weblog syndication and publishing. On the other hand, the deluge of contrived content (spam, weblogs about mortgage refinancing, etc) is sure to follow. My question is: Are you in favor of ads inside RSS? If not, will you unsubscribe from your feeds that use them?" While it's only fair for sites to seek some form of income for various reasons, what behavior would you consider "going too far" when it comes to advertisements?

Comments

depends on the feed

[beegle]

I think it depends on the RSS feed.

If the feed provides full article text, I think ads are reasonable. With full articles, I have absolutely no reason to visit the site, so I'm eating bandwidth and giving nothing in return.

If, on the other hand, the RSS feed just has headlines, I think that ads are too much. With a headline-only feed, EVERY message is ALREADY an ad for the full article on the web site, so putting even more ads in is just excessive.

Re:depends on the feed

[EnderWigginsXenocide]

I think that ads are too much.

I agree. I plan on sending my RSS feeds through my spam filter. Hopefully that'll cut down on the ads.

Re:Depends on the feed

[IpalindromeI]

Is that true? Having ads intermingled with your content is too invasive for you? Please explain how you own the content that you neither create, nor wish to support through viewed advertising. Perhaps you believe you inherently own everything that is offered at no cost to you? That it is your right to receive it without ads?

Re:depends on the feed

[cafebabe]

Those are my thoughts exactly. Only one of the ~40 feeds that I subscribe to has ads in its feeds but they're stuck at the end of full-text messages and are frequently related to the subject matter (like an Amazon referral for a book mentioned in the post). I'd much rather have a short Google AdWords ad at the bottom of a post and get the full text than have to go visit a web page. It saves me time and it feels more SFW (although I'm sure that's just wishful thinking).

The full-text feed with ads bothers me a lot less than the feeds that cut off after X number of words, even if it's in the middle of a sentence. I HATE those. Summaries are tolerable, if annoying - sentence fragments are not.

Re:Depends on the feed

[samael]

No, it is my _choice_ to receive it without ads.

I will happily visit websites that have ads around the edges (I reserve adblock for use on blinking flashing things). I occasionally see cool things in Googles adwords. But I will not put up with ads mixed into my content.

Re:Depends on the feed

[IpalindromeI]

My point was about the phrase "my content", not the issue with ads. I agree that you can choose to read or not those feeds with ads. I even agree that you can choose to filter out the ads you do receive. What I do not agree with is the idea that the content is yours. It is not yours. You are a consumer of the content, but you are not its producer. Your phrasing implies that you are annoyed that the content's true producers would even imagine changing what they rightfully own, in a way that you dislike.

Re:Depends on the feed

[samael]

I meant 'my content' in the same way as I'd say "My walk to work" or "my view" - not ownership, but participation.

Aggregator Filter

[Apreche]

As more people use RSS more people use RSS aggregators. Right now for example I can subscribe to gizmodo and engadget. But lets say I only want certain types of new from them, and not duplicate news. The way of the future is an aggregator which combines all your RSS feeds into a single news feed customized for you. This filter will also remove ads. It will probably be easier to remove ads from RSS than it is to filter spam e-mail due to the nature of the beast. And thus, putting ads in RSS is stupid. And if someone trys to put ads in there and keeps fiddling to get them through the filters, I'll unsubscribe from them. There's more than one blog of type X out there. There will always be at least one that's ad-free.

Don't disguise ads as content

[Anonymous Coward]

Under any circumstances. Make what's an ad very clear before the user has to click more to read it.

Tricking your readers will cause them to stop being your readers.

Re:Don't disguise ads as content

[AeroIllini]

Make what's an ad very clear before the user has to click more to read it.

Excellent point. The issue here is that RSS feeds are rendered in different ways, depending on the XML parser reading them, and there is currently no standard for setting advertisements apart from content. I think it would be considerate of the RSS publishers, if they are going to include the ads in their feed, to mark them differently, say with an "advert" attribute in the title tag (the W3C should be contacted about standardizing that attribute, of course). That way, RSS parsers can choose their own method of identifying ads, be it by italicizing them, putting the text in a different color, adding the string **ADVERTISEMENT** to the front of the headline, removing them altogether, whatever. This would be very similar to what Google does with its "Sponsored Links" section. They're there, but the reader can easily tell the difference between legitimate headlines and ads. Responsible RSS publishers would know that they are not deceiving their users, and responsible RSS parsers would keep the ads visible but separate, in order to support the publishers.

There would be a certain amount of workarounds and illegitimacy, of course, but that happens anyway and those people tend to be shunned in the Internet community. Advertisements in RSS feeds are going to happen whether we like it or not, so we should set up a viable and moderate model for them now before things start to get out of control (like they did with pop-up windows).

Re:Don't disguise ads as content

[YrWrstNtmr]

This would be very similar to what Google does with its "Sponsored Links" section. They're there, but the reader can easily tell the difference between legitimate headlines and ads.

Evidently, no they can't.

And thus another arms race begins

[finkployd]

So we start again. Next come the RSS readers that do not display the ads, then come the ads that try to get around this, etc.

What people always fail to understand is that RSS and the Web are pull technologies. My browser requests what I tell it to and displays what I want to see. If I configure it to not request images that I do not want to see, or to not pop up windows when javascript requests this, that is my business. This is not "push" where your server tells my browser what to display, my browser asks your server for specific files and if you return them to me, I am free to interpret (render) them any way I want.

Please plan your business models accordingly. If you refuse to accept this archetecture, consider delivering content on a different medium.

Finkployd

Re:And thus another arms race begins

[pv2b]

I think the pull/push disctinction is kinda irrelevant here. After all, they do have ad filters for televisions now -- and television is probably the most pushy medium you're going to find. (In more than one sense of the word.)

Not to mention that if you had some kind of Pointcast-like kind of system, you could very well write a hacked client which would receive the ads but never display them, and nobody would be any the wiser.

But your main point remains. Today we have the technology to ignore/skip some of the content we're sent. It may not be perfect at all times, but it's there, but at the moment, fighting the filters in an arms race is pretty much what site owners can do.

I myself don't really have any business model lined up for the free-of-charge web sites that are ad-supported at the moment, other than some form of subscription-only based service. Sure, micropayments are here, and are probably not that hard to get working, but the problem remains -- why would anybody use micropayments to get content which they can get elsewhere for free using their ad-stripping proxies?

Personally, I don't use any ad-stripping proxies at all. I like to see exactly what I'm being sent, and sometimes ads can even be vaguely relevant to the information I'm looking for. The real challenge, in other words, is making ads that people *want* to see. Google adwords and similar programs are actually pretty damn close. Fight the reason people block ads, not the ad-blocking itself, before it's too late and everybody runs adblock software already.

So

[russint]

How long until someone writes a plugin similar to adblock for your favourite rss reader?

Re:So

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're using Thunderbird or Firefox, you can block ads pretty easily with userContent.css ad blocking. The Mozilla 1.8/Firefox 1.1 code is even better, because you can apply styles to specific URLs.

Re:So

[FrankRizzo,Sr.]

I'm running on my XP partion, RSSnewsticker a free as in beer ticker. I run it thru Privoxy a Sourceforge project. I don't know if these forthcoming adds will be totally text based, or have their own little icons, etc.. but if they are anything like most web pages they will be filtered out..

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, the deluge of contrived content (spam, weblogs about mortgage refinancing, etc) is sure to follow.

Why on earth would you subscribe to a newsfeed about morgage refinancing? You do know how feeds work don't you?

Ads being inserted into legitimate feeds is another matter. If it bugs you, don't subscribe to them, same as not visiting websites that foist annoying ads upon you.

Just a continuation....

[greechneb]

Everything will eventually have ads. Eventually we'll be the way of futurama:

Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?

Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!

Why, even my sig has an ad....

Re:Just a continuation....

[Nosf3ratu]

How long until people with pyramid-scam spam links in their sigs are moderated down to be hidden?

Re:Just a continuation....

[batemanm]

Why, even my sig has an ad....

And your post has an ad for your sig and what is strange is it work, I read your sig :-)

It's no problem

[wikinerd]

Ads in RSS are actually textads, so they don't use any bandwidth and are not annoying. If they are targeted, they can be useful, too.

Re:It's no problem

[IpalindromeI]

Please explain how text ads do not use any bandwidth. Perhaps the electrons travel through hyperspace instead of cyberspace?

Depends on the feed

[samael]

Personally I'd rather that they provide headlines and then a link to the main text on their site (which would have adverts). Having ads intermingled with my actual content is just a step too invasive for me.

I don't see this becoming too successful, but...

[Jerf]

Remember that RSS is even more "pull" than a web page. You might casually follow a link from a Slashdot story or something and end up at a site with a lot of ads, but you won't casually subscribe to an RSS feed. So, you're not going to have to worry much about "RSS spam" in the general case.

I have no ethical problems with ads in RSS feeds. But from a user experience point-of-view, I have a hard time imagining that I would stick with an RSS feed with anything remotely resembling obtrusive ads. I might tolerate a single Google-text-ad type ad on an excellent full-text feed, but much more than that and good-bye. (Including a non-"excellent" feed; merely "good" and I'll likely just unsubscribe.)

You can slap an ad on a webpage, but you can't just slap one on an RSS feed. I just can't see this becoming a problem, and anyone that tries to make it one will probably end up self-destructing.

I think it doesn't matter

[Alpha27]

The same way we have gotten used to ads on websites, the same way we will get used to ads in RSS feeds.

We will train ourselves to ignore that ad above that says "Test your skills with Java(TM) and win an Ipod. Take the challenge for Java(TM)". Ads are a must for many, if many bloggers didn't have some type of revenue coming in to support their sites, then many would not exist. Financial support is a necessity for many. So, we will get over that as we have gotten over the RSS feeds.

And if it's in XML, I'm sure someone will write a stylesheet to parse it out.

Re:I think it doesn't matter

[daeley]

The same way we have gotten used to ads on websites, the same way we will get used to ads in RSS feeds.

If by "gotten used to" you mean "blocking with extreme prejudice," then yes, I will be "getting used to" RSS adverts as well. :)

Freshmeat

[Samus]

I noticed the other day that freshmeat started putting ads in their rss feed. It was a bit annoying because it was like every fifth element or so but my reaction was that scoop is like any of us and needs to make money. I imagine that the number of hits his rss feed gets has increased greatly with firefox recently supporting them as "live bookmarks" so he needs to recoup the cost of serving that content. Personally though I'm now more likely to go to there and view the content because of the rss feed than before because its so easy to see if there is something interesting I want to read about. Whereas before I didn't want to take the time and scan past all of the stuff I wasn't interested in.

Re:Freshmeat

[stevey]

I imagine that the number of hits his rss feed gets has increased greatly with firefox recently

I've noticed this on my site - linked in my sig.

I get lots and lots of hits on my feed URLs, frequently from agregators and readers. But a lot more from Firefox (you can tell because of the user agent string, and the "random" time of day).

The bandwidth used by multiple hits on these small feed files is fairly significant, especially when broken bots will poll the feed every five minutes. Ouch!

I've dropped a lot of broken bots like that over the past few weeks, its just not worth the bandwidth.

But if it's a choice between shutting down the site or showing adverts in the feeds? I'd just drop the site... Adverts have their place on a website, but not in the feeds I dont think.

Hosts file

[BladeMelbourne]

If the image advertisements are on a different server, put the server into /etc/hosts, c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts or c:\windows\hosts

eg:
127.0.0.1 ads.server.com

I do this with Slashdot and other sites I visit frequently. It makes the pages load so much faster.

I would not click on the images if I could see them, so I do not feel that I am doing something unethical. In fact I am reducing bandwidth costs because I wouldn't purchase the advertised product/service anyway.

Are we talking about copyrights?

[graphiz]

I was reading through the news and found that trademark lawyer Martin Schwimmer, who authors The Trademark Blog demands Bloglines to remove his feed. The reason being that his feeds are under creative commons licence which allows somebody to reproduce without Commerical Interest, while Blogline where providing ads with the content. I totally agree to people who inserts ad into their own FULL CONTENT RSS feeds with an intention to make a little money as that sounds okay.

Unobtrusive, Simple to Remove

[Alazoral]

I've noticed these ads too. Because they are text, they don't tend to bother me much, apart from the fact that they are almost inevitably styled/formatted rather than letting the feed reader handle the layout (RSS is content, not layout, and ads should NOT screw with this).

In any case, it shouldn't be too difficult to do a little regexp, because the ads stick out like a sore thumb in the feed code and tend to stick to the same method for inserting them for any given feed. Once you block that div or whathaveyou for that entry, you'll be ad-free for the rest of the feed.

Ads and Blogs

[BlackMagi]

I run a blog, posting is daily when I'm feeling good, about 4 times a week when I'm being slack. I get no money from it, and haven't signed up to any spamvertising of any kind. It gives me the irits. I have a job job, and I don't think getting 25c for every thousand clicks is a very good deal myself. Hey, if I blot out all my content, maybe once a year I could buy myself lunch... Interestingly, some people use spamvertising as a way to generate blog hits. The idea is that more people want wangler-tiddlers than want to read a blog, so you get hits by carrying text advertising that kind of stuff, especially if you're lucky enough to have a pageranking site. But damn the man. This is my revolution, and damned if I'm going to televise it. If you decide you want to hear what I've got to say, you're just going to have to give up mind-numbing pop overtures, glitzy flashing text and feel-good instabuy pieces of impulse plastic. I do NOT come in installments.

Re:Ads and Blogs

[kmmatthews]

Uh, wouldn't the links in your username and sig be televising it?

Love/Hate relationship

[Twylite]

Advertising is a love/hate relationship. Its irritating to get the adverts in the middle of our content, but on the other hand it funds the content provider, meaning that we get content (or get more content, or get better content).

I haven't seen advertising in RSS, but I've been expecting it for some time. The problem in my mind is how it is achieved. In my opinion, there should be no way to place image links or automatically downloaded content into an RSS feed (unless they are merged on the server side, i.e. the client must never get anything except the RSS file).

If you could encode image data inline in an RSS file, I think that would be the ideal delivery system. Specifically images -- nothing executable! Sure, the client software can be updated to not show advertising, but will that happen? The image is part of the feed, you can't get one and not the other (as you do with web sites), so you don't save bandwidth by not displaying the adverts. They're simply there, and inert (they don't intefere with you reading).

A delivery system like this would be good for consumers and advertisers, so it's a good thing IMHO.

Re:Love/Hate relationship

[Yer Mom]

Wouldn't that lead to the ad images counting against the site's bandwidth usage, rather than DoubleClick's (or whoever)?

Would probably cost them more than they make...

Unless the whole feed comes through the ad company - but I can't see many people willingly subscribing to an RSS feed that points to doubleclick.net :)

Re:Love/Hate relationship

[Twylite]

It would ... but then the site and the advertiser would have to take this into consideration into terms of click fees, etc, so that it is beneficial to both parties.

Freshmeat on Slashdot has them

[emptybody]

Looking at todays FreshMeat list on slashdot I see an "ADV: blah blah" entry.

There goes the neighborhood.

ads in rss

[consultutah]

As long as they are clearly identified, I think that it is fine...

Limit

[tygerclaw]

As long as the ads are limitied in amount and content relating. The Google text adds are ok, but something can be much as well.