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Spam Communications The Almighty Buck

RSS and Weblog Ads? 39

Posted by Cliff from the how-far-is-too-far dept.
Worried About Blipverts asks: "Last week I signed up for an RSS feed from a small site and saw that ads were being inserted into content. I was somewhat surprised, even though I'd heard companies like FeedBurner and BlogMine are providing such services. I'm mixed on the subject ... on one hand, compensating webloggers financially is a powerful way to demonstrate the power of weblog syndication and publishing. On the other hand, the deluge of contrived content (spam, weblogs about mortgage refinancing, etc) is sure to follow. My question is: Are you in favor of ads inside RSS? If not, will you unsubscribe from your feeds that use them?" While it's only fair for sites to seek some form of income for various reasons, what behavior would you consider "going too far" when it comes to advertisements?
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RSS and Weblog Ads? More

RSS and Weblog Ads?

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  • depends on the feed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by beegle ( 9689 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @11:35AM (#11480359) Homepage
    I think it depends on the RSS feed.

    If the feed provides full article text, I think ads are reasonable. With full articles, I have absolutely no reason to visit the site, so I'm eating bandwidth and giving nothing in return.

    If, on the other hand, the RSS feed just has headlines, I think that ads are too much. With a headline-only feed, EVERY message is ALREADY an ad for the full article on the web site, so putting even more ads in is just excessive.
    • I think that ads are too much.

      I agree. I plan on sending my RSS feeds through my spam filter. Hopefully that'll cut down on the ads.

    • Those are my thoughts exactly. Only one [oliverwillis.com] of the ~40 feeds that I subscribe to has ads in its feeds but they're stuck at the end of full-text messages and are frequently related to the subject matter (like an Amazon referral for a book mentioned in the post). I'd much rather have a short Google AdWords ad at the bottom of a post and get the full text than have to go visit a web page. It saves me time and it feels more SFW (although I'm sure that's just wishful thinking).

      The full-text feed with ads bothers

  • Aggregator Filter (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @11:36AM (#11480371) Homepage Journal
    As more people use RSS more people use RSS aggregators. Right now for example I can subscribe to gizmodo and engadget. But lets say I only want certain types of new from them, and not duplicate news. The way of the future is an aggregator which combines all your RSS feeds into a single news feed customized for you. This filter will also remove ads. It will probably be easier to remove ads from RSS than it is to filter spam e-mail due to the nature of the beast. And thus, putting ads in RSS is stupid. And if someone trys to put ads in there and keeps fiddling to get them through the filters, I'll unsubscribe from them. There's more than one blog of type X out there. There will always be at least one that's ad-free.

  • Don't disguise ads as content (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Under any circumstances. Make what's an ad very clear before the user has to click more to read it.

    Tricking your readers will cause them to stop being your readers.
    • Make what's an ad very clear before the user has to click more to read it.

      Excellent point. The issue here is that RSS feeds are rendered in different ways, depending on the XML parser reading them, and there is currently no standard for setting advertisements apart from content. I think it would be considerate of the RSS publishers, if they are going to include the ads in their feed, to mark them differently, say with an "advert" attribute in the title tag (the W3C should be contacted about standardizing

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @11:38AM (#11480398)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I think the pull/push disctinction is kinda irrelevant here. After all, they do have ad filters for televisions [tivo.com] now -- and television is probably the most pushy medium you're going to find. (In more than one sense of the word.)

      Not to mention that if you had some kind of Pointcast-like kind of system, you could very well write a hacked client which would receive the ads but never display them, and nobody would be any the wiser.

      But your main point remains. Today we have the technology to ignore/skip some of

  • So (Score:1)

    by russint ( 793669 )
    How long until someone writes a plugin similar to adblock [mozdev.org] for your favourite rss reader?

    • Re:So (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If you're using Thunderbird or Firefox, you can block ads pretty easily with userContent.css ad blocking [mozilla.org]. The Mozilla 1.8/Firefox 1.1 code is even better, because you can apply styles to specific URLs.
    • I'm running on my XP partion, RSSnewsticker a free as in beer ticker. I run it thru Privoxy a Sourceforge project. I don't know if these forthcoming adds will be totally text based, or have their own little icons, etc.. but if they are anything like most web pages they will be filtered out..

  • Huh? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    On the other hand, the deluge of contrived content (spam, weblogs about mortgage refinancing, etc) is sure to follow.

    Why on earth would you subscribe to a newsfeed about morgage refinancing? You do know how feeds work don't you?

    Ads being inserted into legitimate feeds is another matter. If it bugs you, don't subscribe to them, same as not visiting websites that foist annoying ads upon you.

  • Everything will eventually have ads. Eventually we'll be the way of futurama:

    Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?

    Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines. And movies. And at ball games and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No siree!

    Why, even my sig has an ad....

  • It's no problem (Score:3, Informative)

    by wikinerd ( 809585 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @11:52AM (#11480567) Journal
    Ads in RSS are actually textads, so they don't use any bandwidth and are not annoying. If they are targeted, they can be useful, too.

  • Depends on the feed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by samael ( 12612 ) <Andrew@Ducker.org.uk> on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @11:53AM (#11480581) Homepage
    Personally I'd rather that they provide headlines and then a link to the main text on their site (which would have adverts). Having ads intermingled with my actual content is just a step too invasive for me.
    • Is that true? Having ads intermingled with your content is too invasive for you? Please explain how you own the content that you neither create, nor wish to support through viewed advertising. Perhaps you believe you inherently own everything that is offered at no cost to you? That it is your right to receive it without ads?

      • Re:Depends on the feed (Score:3, Insightful)

        by samael ( 12612 )
        No, it is my _choice_ to receive it without ads.

        I will happily visit websites that have ads around the edges (I reserve adblock for use on blinking flashing things). I occasionally see cool things in Googles adwords. But I will not put up with ads mixed into my content.
        • My point was about the phrase "my content", not the issue with ads. I agree that you can choose to read or not those feeds with ads. I even agree that you can choose to filter out the ads you do receive. What I do not agree with is the idea that the content is yours. It is not yours. You are a consumer of the content, but you are not its producer. Your phrasing implies that you are annoyed that the content's true producers would even imagine changing what they rightfully own, in a way that you dislike.

  • I don't see this becoming too successful, but... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @11:54AM (#11480595) Journal
    Remember that RSS is even more "pull" than a web page. You might casually follow a link from a Slashdot story or something and end up at a site with a lot of ads, but you won't casually subscribe to an RSS feed. So, you're not going to have to worry much about "RSS spam" in the general case.

    I have no ethical problems with ads in RSS feeds. But from a user experience point-of-view, I have a hard time imagining that I would stick with an RSS feed with anything remotely resembling obtrusive ads. I might tolerate a single Google-text-ad type ad on an excellent full-text feed, but much more than that and good-bye. (Including a non-"excellent" feed; merely "good" and I'll likely just unsubscribe.)

    You can slap an ad on a webpage, but you can't just slap one on an RSS feed. I just can't see this becoming a problem, and anyone that tries to make it one will probably end up self-destructing.
  • The same way we have gotten used to ads on websites, the same way we will get used to ads in RSS feeds.

    We will train ourselves to ignore that ad above that says "Test your skills with Java(TM) and win an Ipod. Take the challenge for Java(TM)". Ads are a must for many, if many bloggers didn't have some type of revenue coming in to support their sites, then many would not exist. Financial support is a necessity for many. So, we will get over that as we have gotten over the RSS feeds.

    And if it's in XML, I'm
    • The same way we have gotten used to ads on websites, the same way we will get used to ads in RSS feeds.

      If by "gotten used to" you mean "blocking with extreme prejudice," then yes, I will be "getting used to" RSS adverts as well. :)

  • Freshmeat (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Samus ( 1382 ) on Wednesday January 26, 2005 @12:37PM (#11481182) Journal
    I noticed the other day that freshmeat started putting ads in their rss feed. It was a bit annoying because it was like every fifth element or so but my reaction was that scoop is like any of us and needs to make money. I imagine that the number of hits his rss feed gets has increased greatly with firefox recently supporting them as "live bookmarks" so he needs to recoup the cost of serving that content. Personally though I'm now more likely to go to there and view the content because of the rss feed than before because its so easy to see if there is something interesting I want to read about. Whereas before I didn't want to take the time and scan past all of the stuff I wasn't interested in.

    • Re:Freshmeat (Score:2, Interesting)

      by stevey ( 64018 )
      I imagine that the number of hits his rss feed gets has increased greatly with firefox recently

      I've noticed this on my site - linked in my sig.

      I get lots and lots of hits on my feed URLs, frequently from agregators and readers. But a lot more from Firefox (you can tell because of the user agent string, and the "random" time of day).

      The bandwidth used by multiple hits on these small feed files is fairly significant, especially when broken bots will poll the feed every five minutes. Ouch!

      I've dropped a

  • If the image advertisements are on a different server, put the server into /etc/hosts, c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts or c:\windows\hosts

    eg:
    127.0.0.1 ads.server.com

    I do this with Slashdot and other sites I visit frequently. It makes the pages load so much faster.

    I would not click on the images if I could see them, so I do not feel that I am doing something unethical. In fact I am reducing bandwidth costs because I wouldn't purchase the advertised product/service anyway.
  • I was reading through the news and found that trademark lawyer Martin Schwimmer, who authors The Trademark Blog demands Bloglines to remove his feed. The reason being that his feeds are under creative commons licence which allows somebody to reproduce without Commerical Interest, while Blogline where providing ads with the content. I totally agree to people who inserts ad into their own FULL CONTENT RSS feeds with an intention to make a little money as that sounds okay.

  • I've noticed these ads too. Because they are text, they don't tend to bother me much, apart from the fact that they are almost inevitably styled/formatted rather than letting the feed reader handle the layout (RSS is content, not layout, and ads should NOT screw with this).

    In any case, it shouldn't be too difficult to do a little regexp, because the ads stick out like a sore thumb in the feed code and tend to stick to the same method for inserting them for any given feed. Once you block that div or whatha

  • I run a blog, posting is daily when I'm feeling good, about 4 times a week when I'm being slack. I get no money from it, and haven't signed up to any spamvertising of any kind. It gives me the irits. I have a job job, and I don't think getting 25c for every thousand clicks is a very good deal myself. Hey, if I blot out all my content, maybe once a year I could buy myself lunch... Interestingly, some people use spamvertising as a way to generate blog hits. The idea is that more people want wangler-tiddlers

  • Advertising is a love/hate relationship. Its irritating to get the adverts in the middle of our content, but on the other hand it funds the content provider, meaning that we get content (or get more content, or get better content).

    I haven't seen advertising in RSS, but I've been expecting it for some time. The problem in my mind is how it is achieved. In my opinion, there should be no way to place image links or automatically downloaded content into an RSS feed (unless they are merged on the server sid

    • Wouldn't that lead to the ad images counting against the site's bandwidth usage, rather than DoubleClick's (or whoever)?

      Would probably cost them more than they make...

      Unless the whole feed comes through the ad company - but I can't see many people willingly subscribing to an RSS feed that points to doubleclick.net :)

  • Looking at todays FreshMeat list on slashdot I see an "ADV: blah blah" entry.

    There goes the neighborhood.
  • As long as they are clearly identified, I think that it is fine...
  • As long as the ads are limitied in amount and content relating. The Google text adds are ok, but something can be much as well.

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