Google is here at Syndicate and has announced that it will make its AdSense network available to RSS/Atom feeds.
Ahh, ads are coming to RSS. Chris Pirillo should be happy.
What does this mean? Well, it’ll mean more full-text RSS feeds for one. Chris Pirillo, for instance, refused to put full-text feeds out because he only got paid if readers came to his Web site and clicked on his ads. If the world went to RSS, he told me, he wouldn’t be able to pay his bills.
There’s lots of debates about whether advertising in RSS makes sense. I think it does, but you gotta be careful if you put ads in your content. Why? Because they can reduce the value of what you’re writing.
Here, let’s rank RSS feeds from worst (least useful for readers) to best.
Worst: headline only feeds with ads.
Almost worst: partial text feeds with ads.
Barely passable: partial text feeds without ads.
Better: Full text feeds with ads.
Best: Full text feeds with no ads.
I’ll only subscribe to the bottom three kinds of feeds and if your content isn’t really “must read” (the New York Times, for instance) then you better stick with the bottom two.
Again, when I subscribe to an RSS feed that means I want a long-term relationship. Think about what that means. How abusive of me do you want to be? On the readership side we get to decide how much abuse we’ll put up with. You might find that your readers won’t put up with much. In which case you’ll have to decide if a few extra bucks is worth a decreased readership.
Overall, though, this will make new kinds of RSS content possible, so Google deserves credit for doing this.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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