Andy Wibbels

Ads in RSS: Good, Bad, Ugly?

From Ask Metafilter:

I run a blog-style website focused solely on a class of popular shiny plastic gadgets and I’m thinking about adding some sort of text ad to my RSS and Atom feeds. I use Google Adsense on the site itself, but AFAIK they don’t allow Adsense in newsfeeds. Blogads and Pheedo seem to offer just this sort of service. Anyone have experience with either of these? Or newsfeed ads in general?

I think the sites that do a weekly Here’s our sponsors are doing the best job of integrating ads into RSS. I think ads can sour feeds very quickly and degrades/distracts from content. Is what you’re saying really that exclusive that users turned off by ads aren’t going to be able to get the same content elsewhere ad-free? I just think they’re tacky, ungainly and ugly. Do we have to be whoring products and services every minute of the day?
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Andy Wibbels

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One response to “Ads in RSS: Good, Bad, Ugly?”

  1. BobbyMasteria Avatar
    BobbyMasteria

    I saw an ad in a feed, once, and I hated to find that there.
    I can’t explain why.
    The success of feeds is not due to websites displaying other site’s content, it’s due to what aggregation allows us to do.
    How could we check hundreds of sites’ updates every hour, in a few minutes ?
    It’s a pain, even impossible without aggregators.
    Feeds have been made to bring us sites’ updates.
    That’s why they bring nothing else.
    Feeds are the living part of websites.
    The rest, except feedback, is frozen.
    But feeds aren’t supposed to bring full entries, nope, they at least must give us a description of what the full entry is about.
    Unfortunately many bloggers don’t write descriptive titles.
    I’m convinced that users will run away from advertised feeds.
    I also believe that information and access to it must be free so…it’s not gonna be easy to earn money where readers are.

    Reply

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