Ads in RSS - What's Our Take?

Michael Gartenberg | May 05, 2005, 09:08 AM

Dave takes on the issue of Ads in RSS. For those of you on the JupiterTel we did earlier this week on the discussion of RSS for business use, this is exactly the position my colleague Eric Peterson makes (if you're a client, Eric can talk you through the data we have to support this position). Of course this works if you only publish summary feeds. A lot of folks (myself included) want full text feeds because we use RSS to time and place shift reading. In that case, ads in context make perfect sense and of course if you're a user and don't like that arrangement, you can always un-subscribe. Ads aren't bad and for RSS different models will emerge that make sense based on content offering. Like the first banner ads on the internet that created so much controversy for their time, this too will pass. Funny thing, I didn't immediately notice the few ads that started cropping up in my feeds. I knew they were there but my eye just blocked them out. Literally didn't see them at all.

JupiterResearch feeds will continue to be ad free and published in full I'm told :) Of course, I might point out that in the end, each of these feeds is a marketing tool in and of itself and in the long term, might not that be the best model of all?

The feeds themselves are ads for the stories they link to, which are revenue-generators. Anything that keeps people from clicking, that confuses them, takes them off course, is going to drop the click-through rate. And it's a good deal for the users, because they get the headlines and summaries for articles they only have a superficial interest in, and can easily access the full stories for articles that they want more information on. The rare win-win. [Scripting News]