15Seconds WebLog

Ads in RSS Feeds a Violation of Trust?

Ed Brill writes in his E-mail vs. RSS blog entry, which is referred to in Scoble's blog:

“RSS is succeeding now because of trust.  I add feeds to my reader from sites I'm interested in, or in some cases need to do my job effectively.  What happens the day the humans on the other end of that feed change the rules?  I don't think it has happened yet, but when eWeek or Network World or a blogger decide that RSS would be a great push medium for advertising, the game is over.”

I guess what bothers me is the first sentence about “trust” and third sentence about “rules“. Would serving ads through RSS really violate the users trust? Is there really a rule that says ads can't be served through RSS feeds?

BTW, I have no intentions of serving ads to the 15Seconds feeds. :)

Posted: Jun 10 2004, 01:43 PM by FifteenSeconds | with 2 comment(s)

Comments

mike said:

A very interesting question. I think the "rule" that he refers to is the obviously unstated one that RSS has traditionally (yeah, in the "long tradition" of RSS, heh) been a content-only medium. In theory, I guess, you get the same content as you would if you visited the site that originates the feed, but you get pure content and not all the other stuff that decorates the site, including ads. As you say, though, there's nothing that stops someone from deciding to send (e.g.) banners ads as part of their feed. As we've come to accept for Web-based information generally, "free" information often comes at the price of having to see ads. A commercial site (newspaper, say) that offers an RSS feed will soon enough decide that they don't want to give their content away like that, dunno.

It will be interesting to see what happens on that inevitable day. I mean, besides a lot of complaining. :-)
# June 10, 2004 10:37 PM

Steve K. said:

I was thinking more along the lines of even a simple one or two line text-only ad.

I think users need to realize that no matter what the medium is, any content delivery mechanism can (and will) double as an advertising delivery mechanism.
# June 11, 2004 9:12 AM
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