Thursday, April 28, 2005
April 28, 2005
Keep your ads outta my rss!

Today is a sad day for blogs. As I read through bloglines this morning, I'm finding feeds with ads from google. When feedburner added ads it was annoying, but now that google is on the bandwagon it will be overwhelming. I think adsense is a wonderful program (hence the adsense links below), but I will NOT subject my subscribers to ads. So far I have been greeted with "I make 4k$ a week off taking surveys" on a .net blog, irrelevant ads that z-index over images on a gadget blog, and general ADD tendencies to not even read a post because the ad caught my attention instead (which means the ad works, but at the expense of the blog). Maybe I'm being a little too critical on what seems like the first day, and just generally pissed that I now have to look at more ads. The funny part of all this is when I see a post I want to really read, I usually open it up outside bloglines. If I found value in the post it, I almost always click on at least 1 ad to support the site. I will NOT click on an RSS ad, though... stay the hell outta my aggregator.

/me hopes bloglines implements some type of ad blocking

/me starts looking for another aggregator thinking AskJeeves prolly isn't interested in that

Edit : Who needs askjeeves when you've got greasemonkey. Sam Ruby points out a GreaseMonkey js file that will block google's rss ads. Fantastic, and thank you

Random


8:09 AM Eastern Daylight Time    |  Comments [4]  |  Trackback  | 
4/28/2005 9:30:34 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
Hey, if the people whose blog/site you subscribe to can't make money off of ads, they'll have to get a real job. :)
Darrell
4/28/2005 10:09:44 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
No doubt, and I realize ads are a major, if not primary means of revenue for many online publishers. The sites that have the most successful return from advertising usually implement them in a tasteful manner, since their readers are obviously there for the content. The problem I see with rss ads is they will forever be an eyesore since the designers that make the clever placement on the site can't do the same in the feed(*). The condensed nature of rss isn't condusive to ads that in many cases will be larger then the content, possibly multiple times on any given screen. Ok ok, making the ads smaller would help... but then they wouldn't pull my attention away from the content to click on them :)

(*)Unless the feed publishes html of course.. but thats another compatibility issue all together.
Aaron Junod |tranqyAT NOSPAMgmail dot com
4/29/2005 10:01:37 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
I also wanted to point out a feed that I feel has implemented sponsored links in a feed, and did it in an unobtrusive way. Larkware.com, who first polled users about adding ads to the feed, implements sponsored links as text, below the rest of the feed. No colors, no images, it just fits in the post. Ads like this in RSS, imo, are a good way to have ads in your feed, and not take away from your content.
Aaron Junod |tranqyAT NOSPAMgmail dot com
4/29/2005 1:36:41 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)
I've noticed this also. I've stopped reading blogs that have ads in feeds. It seems that advertising perverts every good thing the internet has to offer. If it becomes the norm, I'll just read fewer blogs. Of course, its only my opinion and probly won't have much impact and I doubt anyone elses readership will be effected, since I gather the general consensus is that its annoying but not annoying enough to stop reading them. For me, it is. A feed is a feed, it shouldn't be adverised in. Most of the time, I'll click into it (since most feeds are incomplete articles anyway) and then they can bombard me with ads, but not in the feed... annoying.
Shawn B.


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