Ed Brill discusses RSS as an alternative to e-mail and says game's over once publishers start embedding ads in their RSS feeds:
"RSS is succeeding now because of trust. I add feeds to my reader from sites I'm interested in, or in some cases need to do my job effectively. What happens the day the humans on the other end of that feed change the rules? I don't think it has happened yet, but when eWeek or Network World or a blogger decide that RSS would be a great push medium for advertising, the game is over. We'll spend the same countelss hours trying to separate wheat from chaff in RSS readers that we all already do in e-mail. You might say - well just delete the feed at that point. Sure, but what if the other 90% of that feed's content was important to you? Now what?"
Well, as one of the imperial storm troopers, I guess I have to ask: How does a for-profit company (raises hand here) whose main product is information create a return on its investment in RSS? Sure, there's the prospect that RSS subscribers will click on links to open up ad-laden HTML pages, but so far our experience is that that number is relatively small (of course, it could also be that we don't have as quite as many RSS subscribers as we think - that all those untold page views are being generated by people who don't know they don't have to have their aggregators check our feeds every 15 minutes). How would ads in RSS feeds be different from the ads we now put in our e-mail newsletters? What if we offered customizable RSS feeds, i.e., where you get to decide on the frequency of updates and even the specific keywords used to generate the feeds? Would you be willing to pay a monthly or yearly subscription for something like that? Other approaches?
Back to CompendiumI think the hard thing with RSS feeds and advertising is figuring out an amount of ads that aren't annoying. If you've got a fairly active feed people are going to be put off by so many ads (especially if they all ended up being the same). I wouldn't mind a few ads showing up in my feed for a place with the full text of articles. Maybe I'm fed an ad or two each time I check for new articles. But I'd only accept that if I were getting the full text of the article.
I saw one feed recently that looked like they were trying to make Google AdSense money by having a google search window in every. single. article. they. posted. It was kind of annoying (enough so that I stopped reading the feed).
Posted by: Gregory Blake on June 21, 2004 12:00 PMPost a comment
