RSS and Advertisement

The debate about the implementation of advertisements in RSS feeds gets quite intensive in the Blogosphere, and Scoble made a clear and easy to understand statement concerning feeds with ad content.

1. Worst: headline only feeds with ads.
2. Almost worst: partial text feeds with ads.
3. Barely passable: partial text feeds without ads.
4. Better: Full text feeds with ads.
5. Best: Full text feeds with no ads.

I prefer to read all my daily accquired blogs and news feeds with RSS 2.0 compatible feeds, and once this entire advertisement becomes an annoyance, I believe I will cancel such feeds at once if it is showing clear signs of advertisements in the form of point 1 or point 2. The „golden middle“ found in point 3 seems to be acceptable due to the fact that many newspaper feeds are already partial, but once the advertisement like in the almost worst case gets too much covering, I’d delete the feed off my aggregator.

I consider the fourth option to be debatable. Receiving the full text as usual is definately the best way to keep feeds being read by the audience, and the usual method of trying to grab some money out of i.e. Google’s AdSense programs at the bottom of the feed content is quite acceptable – since many authors need this money to finance their blog work. But in the end, I will probably stick to the best case of showing no advertisements in the feeds – or we could simply go by traditional bookmark surfing again, or not?

[via RSS Blogger, Scoble]