Typical Benchmarks…. in Ruby Land The Flash. The Rails one, not the Macromedia/Adobe one
Jun 25

Advertising in RSS Feeds

Tech Add comments

Advertising in RSS feeds isn’t totally new, but it is becoming more common place. Whenever I see feeds with ads at the bottom I don’t mind TOO much, as I know that these companies are just trying to make some money, and I am good at ignoring them (unless they do a great job of giving out REAL content).

Dave saw, what I recently say, when TheServerSide added ads via pheedo. In this case it was just a (hopefully) one of mistake.

The biggest annoyance is when feeds are not setup correctly. I have had a few feeds, where a day later, and I have 10 duplicates of the same entry, with the only difference being the ad content at the bottom!

This is unacceptable, and has the affect of making people unsubscribe to the feed.

So, if we DO have to go with ads in feeds as more people use feed readers to get their content, lets at least be smart about it.

3 Responses to “Advertising in RSS Feeds”

  1. Adam Kalsey Says:

    “The biggest annoyance is when feeds are not setup correctly. I have had a few feeds, where a day later, and I have 10 duplicates of the same entry, with the only difference being the ad content at the bottom!”

    Pheedo agrees completely. In fact that’s one of the reasons we’re in this business. When we started over a year ago, we determined that ads in feeds were inevitable and we were concerned that people doing ads wrong could significantly harm RSS adoption. So Pheedo is working hard to do things the right way instead. An ad isn’t the focus of the feed, so we’re not going to treat is as such. We won’t cause your feed items to continually refresh just so we can insert new advertising.

  2. Michael Mahemoff Says:

    But their feeds are anemic anyway, containing only links. Feeds stand to make more from advertising if they have a strong base of active readers, and full text is a prerequisite for that to happen.

  3. Mike Flacklestein Says:

    I live at 16804 Commonwealth in Seattle. Been up here before?

Leave a Reply

Spam is a pain, I am sorry to have to do this to you, but can you answer the question below?

Q: What are the first four letters in the word British?