Ad placement in RSS feeds?

Comments

1. Webbie (2 comments.) says:

   7/29/2004 at 11:49 am

   The website http://www.newsisfree.com already provide a type of advert inserted rss newsfeeds of many other websites that don’t provide one. I would recommend a look at that.
   I subscribe to a few feeds via them because a couple of my favourite websites and the only advertising bit they do insert – at the moment – is one mentioning their very own website, but I can tolerate that if it means getting all the news delivered to my desktop.
2. Kitten (3 comments.) says:

   7/30/2004 at 6:23 am

   Good Idea

   With feed traffic taking up so much bandwidth nowadays, some sort of return would be worthwhile. I think I’m going to hack up the WP feed files to insert my PayPal link.
3. Mark (34 comments.) says:

   7/30/2004 at 7:43 am

   That is also a great idea. Im sure a single paypal link would not hurt anything.
4. mpt (2 comments.) says:

   8/20/2004 at 4:32 am

   How annoying would it be? Why not subscribe to some of the feeds containing ads and tell us?

   If advertising became common enough, I’d expect feedreaders to start incorporating Bayesian (or similar) spam filtering, for the same reason e-mail clients do. It wouldn’t work as well for feeds as it does for e-mail, however, for two reasons: (1) there’s much less header information to distinguish feed spam than there is to distinguish e-mail spam, and (2) feed spam can be embedded inside legitimate articles in a way that’s not possible for e-mail spam. (Banners and other predictable-format ads could be filtered just as they are by advanced Web browsers, but filtering free-form text ads would be more difficult.)

   If, however, feedreaders gained effective spam-filtering unevenly (i.e. not within a few months of each other), HTTP’s User-Agent header would eventually become obsolete, as some feed providers chose to block feedreaders known to filter ads, and those feedreaders responded by masquerading as UAs known not to do any filtering. (This is already happening, for different reasons, with Web browsers: Internet Explorer partially masquerades as Mozilla, Safari partially masquerades as Gecko, and Opera by default masquerades as Internet Explorer.)
5. Sherri (10 comments.) says:

   8/1/2004 at 7:40 am

   Text only, or small NON-animated images wouldn’t be too awful, if they were spaced out between the actual feeds. I would NOT like it if the ad were placed in the text of every single excerpt (like a very popular blog USED to do…UGH). And please, no new windows (are people even using IE anymore?)