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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?
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.
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.