Thursday, November 18, 2004

RSS advertising

According to this article on Wired, Feeburner has pilot program going that allows advertising content to be inserted into RSS feeds.  There are 2 sides to the issue of advertising in RSS:

  1. Many people say that RSS is a syndication format that is not designed for ads.
  2. Many people say that RSS is simply another kind of delivery mechanism that is ripe for advertising.

I write my blog and distribute its content via RSS because I choose to; I am not in this for the money.  Lots of the content for my blog comes from other blogs and if the RSS feeds of other blogs that I read becomes too invasive to my reading experience, I will probably stop reading them.

There are lots of blogs out there that are already non-invasively advertising on their RSS feeds.  Take Engadget, for example, that adds a small text-based advertisement to the bottom of each of their posts that looks like this:

Weblogs, Inc. RSS feeds brought to you by
iPod®. Meet Bose. Introduce your iPod® to Bose, then listen to the new SoundDock.

The kind of RSS advertising like that pictured above I do not find invasive enough to stop reading the blog.  I will be very interested to see how the Feeburner advertising looks in a RSS reader; to see how intrusive the advertising really is.

It certainly makes me wonder is one of the points of differentiation for a RSS aggregator will wind up being a RSS advertising blocking function.

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