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

[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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. :)