A Bit on RSS and Advertising
November 18th, 20042 interesting articles were published today on advertisements in RSS Feeds. I saw them both on The RSS Weblog. First, a story from CNET entitled, “Overture tests RSS ads” and the other from Wired headlined “Advertisers Muscle Into RSS“. In addition to this, I finally got my hands on that article in Searcher by Tara Calishain.
So, ads in RSS is hot now. I commented on this back in June:
“About ads in RSS Feeds, I will only keep my subscription active in a feed if the quality of the content outweighs the number of ads. This is not a scientific calculation. It’s a feeling. That said, to this date, I do not subscribe to any feeds that have ads, so that must say something. If Library Journal or Information Today came out with feeds that linked me to full text articles already found on their website and had ads mixed in, then I would probably subscribe. Actually, I would definitely subscribe.”
I still feel the same way 5 months later. InfoToday has since provided feeds for some of their content (not LJ though), but has a way to go before I’m completely satisfied. I’m still getting on my buddies at ITI, so don’t worry about them. They do get it. It’s only a matter of time (I hope) before they are completely “RSSified”.
The ads/RSS theme came up during one of my sessions this week and I addressed it. I mentioned that if the costs of seeing an ad outweighs the quality of the content in the non-ad posts and if I didn’t have to think about it, then I probably would deal with the ads. If I had to even question my loyalty to the feed that started to provide ads, I probably would unsubscribe. That said, I’ve unsubscribed to all feeds that have started throwing ads in their feeds. This may change as more and more content providers join in, but for now, it just isn’t worth it for me.