The RSS Advertising Debate Rages, But is it Effective?
RSS Advertising Is Good
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/7668
RSS Advertising has become somewhat contraversial amongst the zimmer framed blogpuppies of bygone fame, not to mention a heathy smattering of the "i can't think for myself" crowd. But Hadley Stern says RSS Advertising is Good, and it's hard not to agree with such a well articulated argument.
Each innovation on the web appears with an altruistic sunnyness. Indeed, in the very beginning of the web commercial hyperlinking was strongly frowned upon by the geeks that knew the infrastructure. No one could have imagined a commercialized web with Amazon, eBay, let alone all the porn sites out there. But eventually they had to capitulate. And now we have ecommerce. Yes, a substantial part of the web still runs on passion alone, and many places are a combination of passion and commerce.
Apparently Hadley has had good results with Google RSS ads in his feeds, though the tight bastard didnt give any figures or stats :)
Has anyone here tried RSS Ads? I'd love to know how effective you've found them - i'd quite like to test it here at TW in fact...
RSS ads
Haven't tried them so can't give first hand knowledge, but I can say the targeting is adequate at best, and ridiculously funny when it's off target.
--
Is it effective yet? No. Can it be made more effective? Yes. Do RSS feeds need to be commercialized? Probably, if they're going to remain free and unfettered from copyright challenges. Which is where the Net purists get all flustered. They want information to be free, which in short, means they want someone else to pay for it.
So as soon as they find out someone is making a buck, they start shaking like a hound dog shittin peach pits, (hehe that's a new one) and start going on about the old days, when the web was free.
Right now, the targeting is bad enough that when I encounter RSS ads, I drop the feed. BUT, when the targeting gets better...
I have been testing AdSense
I have been testing AdSense for Feeds on JenSense - more from the point of view of wanting to test it, and it's the only blog I have, rather than trying to monetize it that way. I am not even sure I have made enough to buy a latte yet, LOL. However, being a blog that talks about AdSense, not very many people would be inclined to click those ads.
For now, I will keep them up because I like to watch things like relevancy and note anything interesting AdSense happens to be testing with their AFF product.
I think people's tolerance of RSS ads depends on what they are getting in the feed. If you are giving people the entire entry via RSS, I don't mind if you slap some ads on it. But I don't agree with people doing the twenty-five word snippet AND RSS ads.
I'm probably more with you Nick
I'm more with you on feeds, I think that a partial feed that serves as a way for readers to target what they want to read, like you use for Threadwatch, is better than a full feed with ads. Couple of reasons, I've tried RSS ads and they weren't worth it. Secondly, even if they return continued everytime someone doesn't click thru to the site its less that the big advertisers will pay for advertising on any of my sites because the traffic decreases.
I must admit to struggling
I must admit to struggling with the way i do rss at tw duncan. A partial feed without live links isn't very TW but then i can't stand full feeds personally, and i do want people on the actual site.
One day i'll experiment a bit, but not now i think...
How many of you use partial feeds?
On another list I'm on some of the readers were quite vocal about not wanting to subscribe to partial feeds, they wanted the full content in the feed. How many people here offer full feeds, or does everyone offer a partial feed? I'm wondering how prevalent that opinion is among blog readers. The argument they gave was that they didn't have the time to go and visit each site to read the full text, but it seems to me that the good feed readers have things integrated enough it shouldn't matter.