Advertising In RSS Feeds - My Take

Tim Marman points to a Mike Gunderloy post about advertising in RSS Feeds. This is a subject that I've been grappling with for a few months now, so I'll give you my perspective on it.

A few weeks ago, I posted on LonghornBlogs that it was time to start experimenting with ways for the community to be self sufficient - that is, to generate enough revenue on its own to sustain its operation. I stated right off the bat that I wasn't going to do banner ads, and some folks thought I was a quack. There is a very specific reason for that, however, and it wasn't just some rash decision that I made.

In that post, I discussed the normal evolution of a community, and how LonghornBlogs was different. Now, if the site was run by a couple og guys just for the hell of it, and it turns into a business, that is one thing. LonghornBlogs started with a company already behind it. Therefore, those company interests have to be taken into account at all times. For example, if I put banner ads up, I have to allow everyone that wants to advertise within a given market sector to be able to do so. Therefore, if I allow .NET component vendors to advertise there, then everyone has to be able to, lest I find myself in court for discrimination.

Now, Interscape is a .NET component vendor, among other things. So, what if a company like Aspose wants to market Aspose.Excel there? Or MakeItScroll.com wants to put up a $10,000 banner ad campaign? Now, company-owned sites are obligated to advertise for direct competitors. Now, I may be young, but I'm not masochistic. I'm not about to commit entrepreneurial suicide by shooting my company in the foot and letting is slowly bleed to death.

So banner ads is not the answer in this situation. Business is about risk but I'd rather not go to court if I don't have to. DonXML suggested paid-for-placement reviews of products. While I think this idea has merit, I'm not sure about the implications against an individual. What if the person doesn't like the product? Is he/she still obligated to right good things about it? I hope not, because the person would cease to be a credible source of information. What if he/she does write a bad review of the product. Does he/she have to give the money back, or risk another possibility of lawsuit? Plus, it could easily go too far, turning people into blog-whores, prostituting themselves to advertising much like many sites do today. One of the reasons that the blog medium is so cool is because it's filtered information based on your own tastes. All of what you want to see, not much of what you don't. In today's world, tools like these are critical to just maintaining sanity.

So now we get to the concept of dumping ads into an RSS feed.  Like anything else, done tastefully, this could be extremely effective. 72% of LonghornBlogs.com's hits come from the RSS feeds, at an average readership hovering around 22,000 unique visitors a month. Nearing almost 3 million hits a month, that's quite a lot of impressions. Inserting a small text message at the bottom of every 5 feeds or so wouldn't be that big of a deal. A single line of text, at most, with no more than 2 hyperlinks. No pictures, no animated gifs, just simple text.

I don't think that is what is going to happen though. People are going to rush into RSS Advertisement without thinking, and yet another medium designed to simplify our lives will be cluttered up with utter nonsense. Wuld I mind so much if they used an AdSense-like tactic, as Tim suggests? Maybe, maybe not. Just because I want to read about something, doesn't necessarily mean that I want to see ads related to whatever it is I'm reading.

So what would I like to see? Personally, there needs to be a way to authenticate to get an customized RSS feed based on personalization settings, so that I can see what I want to see, when I want to see it. If I want ads, let me choose the frequency and extensiveness of the advertising I want to be exposed to. Until that is possiblt, I think marketers need to do us a favor and stay away until it has been WELL thought out, and extremely tasteful.

3 Comments

  • Where did you get the idea that just because a vendor wants to advertise on your site that you have to let them? (Even if they are in the same market as other vendors who you let advertise on your site.)



    That seems like a ridiculous concept to me. Then again, there are many ridiculous laws in this ridiculous country.



    You own the site, and you decide it's content. If you don't want to post any one person's ads on your site, you don't (shouldn't) have to.

  • The possibility for negative publicity is significantly greater if I allow one vendor to advertise and don't allow a similar vendor. Too much political garbage for a small company to deal with. I'd be willing to wager $20 that a successful lawsuit could come to pass on just that kind of claim.

  • Ads in RSS ? Nobody seen Betanews Rss ? They use ads since a while.Cause I do´nt like ads in Feeds I just unsuscribed of that site. You want ads, I don¨t want your feed. That´s it!

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