RSS and the inevitability of advertising
The Weblogs Inc blogs (Engadget for example) and Longhorn Blogs and both running Google AdSense ads. Is anyone really surprised that Google is getting into the RSS advertising game?
I find the whole idea of ads in RSS feeds rather silly. Want me to visit your site? Then publish a feed with excerpts or titles. I admit that I prefer full content feeds, but I prefer excerpts over ads given the choice. At the same time I’ve accepted the inevitability of ads in RSS feeds (I’m hoping they’ll end up being a lousy way to generate revenue and people will drop them).
Advertising in RSS is just starting now, for all practical purposes. If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads.
I’m afraid this would lead to another ads-vs-developers arms race like we have with popups and browsers. I think the developers will win in the end, but the ads could get a lot more annoying in the meantime. I think the better idea is to embrace feeds that don’t have ads, or ones that use them in non-annoying ways. For example, I’m about ready to ditch Cool Hunting now that they animated banner ads in every single item in the feed!
The Google ads are actually fairly modest, and I almost prefer them to text ads, which tend to blend in with feed content. However, the Google ads keep overlapping the content in the feed!
So what don’t I mind? Check out Russell Beattie’s feed.
So in the end it looks like FeedBurner is the least obnoxious option if we’re going to have to put up with ads in RSS feeds. It turns out that FeedBurner is going to support AdSense ads. Here’s hoping they can do a good job with the integration.
Update: After another day of reading feeds with Google ads, I want to take back a bit of what I said. They’re more annoying than I gave them credit for. I’m also going to revise my stance on text ads after reading about the problems graphical ads pose for mobile devices and realizing that while current graphical ads may be low-key (except those damn Cool Hunting ads) they very likely won’t stay that way. I’m still not a fan of text ads for technical reasons (can’t be filtered, changing them means the whole feed gets updated) but I think they’re the least intrusive and anoyying as a reader. So if you must have ads in your feed then use text ads first, or subtle graphical ads like FeedBurner’s.