Advertising in RSS

IonRSS blogged Slashdot, the hugely popular "News for Nerds" website, has also recently started putting adverts in its RSS feed.

I set up their RSS feed as a test, and I dont see the ads.

Joseph Scott investigated and found that the ads are being served by the Feedster Media Network, which is a partnership between RSS Search engine Feedster and AdBrite.

In a comment on Joseph's blog, Mike Rowehl noted that he's been "running the technical part of the RSS ads implementation at Feedster". Mike explained that "we actually have a slot to place an ad every couple of stories" in the Slashdot RSS feed. Mike writes more about FeedsterMedia on his own blog.

What's wrong with RSS adverts?

Dave Winer has posted a passionate plea for RSS users to "reject the idea" of advertising in RSS feeds. He wants RSS reader developers to "add a feature that strips out all ads," something that Charlie Woods has been actively toying with in his spare time (he works at Newsgator).

While there are already ways to hide advertising in RSS, this is only ever going to be a geek's way of dealing with the issue. Normal people won't go to such lengths.

Is there anything essentially wrong with adverts in RSS feeds? In response to Dave Winer's post, I asked three questions in the comments thread:

1) Which is better: an excerpted RSS feed (where you have to click through to read the whole post), or a full-text RSS feed with some ads? Personally I'd prefer the latter.
2) Really, what is the difference between advertising in an RSS feed and advertising on a webpage? RSS is becoming the new HTML - why fight it?

I dont have to spend the bandwidth and cpu time to see an ad on a website unless I decide to view the website. The RSS feed just tells me the subject of the article, and I can decide whether or not I want to read it

3) What's wrong with publishers/writers/bloggers wanting to get paid for their work, just as software developers want to get paid for their work?

If I choose to read their site that is one thing, but if they are going to cram ads down my throat while I am trying to see whether or not I want to read them, I am going to delete that Live Bookmark

What's your opinion? Feel free to leave a comment here and also at his site

RSS feeds can be used several different ways, and it may be that ads in RSS feeds only appear when one brings them into a special reader program or something like that, but I am definitely opposed to them in the way I use RSS, which is in a Live Bookmark in Firefox. As this indicates, I have a problem right now, because I have so many RSS feeds that when Firefox refreshes them (once an hour) my computer locks up (with near 100% CPU utilization) for about 5 minutes, and this is EXTREMELY frustrating to me. Richard, I would be absolutely outraged if ads started appearing in those RSS feeds, making my computer lock up for even longer each hour.

You say Slashdot has recently begun inserting ads in their RSS feeds. Here is a copy of their RSS feed as I see it in Firefox

and as you can see from the fact that each entry begins with their FavIcon, I looked at each one, and they did not appear to be ads, but maybe I am wrong.

Nick Bradbury blogged Like many of us, I hate seeing advertisements everywhere I go. The problem isn't just that ads can be annoying: it's also that advertisers affect the content we see, and I don't wish to give them that power yet again. So, the question is, should FeedDemon strip ads? I've wrestled with this quite a bit, and I've seriously considered making it possible to apply your own filters to what you see in FeedDemon, so that you could filter out ads by choice. These filters could be shared with other FeedDemon users, much like newspaper styles are - and hey, wouldn't it be nice if these filters could be used by any RSS aggregator, and not just FeedDemon? But despite my personal dislike for some forms of advertising, in the end I've decided that FeedDemon should not strip ads, at least not by default. I don't wish to deprive income from those who rely on ad revenue - that in itself would shut out voices we might wish to hear. Plus, ads may give some people enough incentive to offer full-text feeds instead of excerpts, since a big reason people use excerpts is to drive traffic to their site where readers can view their ads. I'd prefer full-text feeds with ads over excerpts without them (and so would Richard MacManus).

Chao blogged While I think he's absolutely right that advertisers who provide rss of commercial information we are interested in will see a much bigger payoff than embedding their ads in other people's RSS feeds, I think the trend of advertising in RSS is unstoppable. Entrepreneurs like Jason Calacanis will ensure that. This feels like a rehash of people who tried to stop commercialism in Usenet. In the end, the web basically routed around usenet.

Alex Barnett blogged Nick rightly points out the potential hassle RSS ad blocking would bring to the party. But there is another reason I think the RSS advertising arms race is not worth the hassle, and it is to do with the power of markets. To set the scene, there are broadly three types of RSS advertising today:

• RSS ad article
  Example is the Moreover feed, the RSS ad is an article. Free news service, comprehensive, it works. Don't want any ads? Unsubscribe.
• RSS emebedded ad (within article)
  From the Slashdot feed, the ad is embedded within the RSS article. Are there droves of RSS subscribers unsubscribing because of the ads? I don't know. I do know this: if subscribers don't perceive the value of the content to justify the eyesore, they'll unsubscribe.
• RSS ad feed
  Amazon.com provides a load of feeds. This is David Winer's view of what RSS advertising should be, where the RSS feed IS the RSS ad. This works. Fine. But should this be the only way?

bob wyman blogged We've recently received complaints about a large number of duplicate entries suddenly being published by PubSub. This has been a bit of a surprise because we normally get good marks on the effectiveness of our duplicate detection algorithms... On close inspection, it appears that the recent problems are being caused by DoubleClick ads which are being inserted in such a way that the duplicate detection code in our feed readers is tricked into thinking that the entries with DoubleClick ads are "updated" every time we read them.

SVW blogged The "RSS and Advertising" panel at Syndicate was fascinating because this has become such a hot topic issue. Internet guru Dave Winer has recently been advocating ad-free RSS feeds and urging boycotts of publishers that pollute their feeds with ads. Google, Yahoo, Moreover and others are paying no attention - on the contrary, they are rubbing their hands with glee at the fat cash cow they see in mixing ads into RSS feeds.

On Tuesday Google launched its public beta of AdSense for Feeds at the show, saying it would enable content producers to make money and plough that back into generating yet more quality content. Shuman Ghosemajumder, business product manager for AdSense, called this a "virtuous cycle" that would enable the production of larger amounts of high quality content - and lead to a better society.

And the destruction of RSS Feeds

That's a noble goal, and Google's AdSense network, which publishes content-related text ads on third-party sites, has generated more money for small publishers than anything else. Yet the modest revenues earned by most of the 200,000-plus AdSense network sites are under threat because of RSS, which allows people to read content without going to the originating web site.

It allows me to read the title of an article. Do you call that "content"

For many web sites using RSS, 50 to 70 percent of their readers subscribe to their RSS feeds and rarely see the web site itself. Since Google AdSense only pays if someone clicks on an ad, Google had to figure out a way to mix ads into the RSS feed and collect the clicks and usage patterns.