I previously indicated I intend to shut off the feed from this blog. That will happen at the end of this month – that timing is because I’m curious to see what happens to traffic. I’ve given my reasons, but there’s another good reason: the coming glut of advertising to your RSS feed. Here’s an excerpt (Link) from one excited member of the marketing community looking to use syndication technology to advertise:
New techniques are being unveiled that allow marketers to leverage the appeal and growing adoption of RSS without sacrificing their hard work of the last decade to achieve measurability, targetability and flexibility.
…
With these next-generation solutions, each recipient gets his or her own unique feed, enabling marketers to understand exactly how many and which recipients are picking up their messages. And because each feed is unique to the individual recipient, marketers can track and measure subscriber actions all the way down to an individual, facilitating the same behavioral targeting and testing possible in other personalized media. Moreover, marketers can actually create a unique message for each user based upon demographic or behavioral data.
Now I know what the argument is going to be: you don’t have to subscribe to the feed if it’s full of ads. That’s right. Only I’ve been watching as some of my favorite blogs slowly morph into advertising whores. Some barely even load anymore they’re so full of code delivering dynamic, trackable, analyzable content. All that AdSense crap is becoming nonsense. I barely visit the MIT Advertising blog anymore, it loads so slowly. And the BusinessWeek blogs have been running some horrendous Land Rover ad that drops the site loading to a crawl (you’ll notice I’ve dumped BusinessWeek and Nussbaum from my blogroll). And if you’ve visited Bruce Sterling’s blog in the past few days, you’ve noticed a change over there as well. It’s off the blogroll too.
Of course, people will make their own choices. Some sites will doubtlessly strike a balance that makes RSS subscribers happy. In the meantime, on someone’s reader, my content is going to be (and likely already is) sandwiched between two RSS ads. By virtue of that aggregation, my content has, by default, become part of someone else’s advertising campaign. This juxtaposition won’t happen all the time, I know. And again, with all the feed reading options out there, for some people it won’t happen at all. But I don’t want it happening, period.
Every aspect of blogging is being gradually usurped by those who envy it as a potential marketplace and covet it for it’s sheer number of devotees.
The Main Stream Media both loves and hates blogging to the point that they copy the format like it’s a piece of popular clothing, and then ridicule it for being a useless form of information. It should come as no surprise that the snakeoil salesmen, the shopkeepers and the moneychangers would also want to squat on a portion of it for themselves.
There is no virtue in unbridled greed, nothing pure in abusing a resource for personal profit and no end to which some will go to gladly achieve both.
In addition to the clogged RSS feeds you mention, we can expect that the spammers will be more noticeable once programs like ‘Blog-Blaster’ finds its way onto the average, small business desktop. ( http://www.blog-blast.com )
To this point, we’ve manned the ramparts by installing various plugins designed to defeat the intruders… but I fear the war could eventually be lost and with it, this grand experiment in free expression. People wish to be free… but the free market demands a captive audience…
Well said.
The only option I see is to have people make an effort.
I suspect I’ll lose a fair amount of traffic as a result. Not an issue to me. If anything, I’ll get a sense for how many people really want an interactive medium, and how many just want a different kind of television.
I like AdSense. It has given many people an opportunity to get paid for the work they put into their blogs and, most importantly, an incentive to improve the quality through an effective feedback mechanism that is the monthly paycheck.
In the absence of a better reward system, AdSense is a necessary evil. Asking bloggers to drop the ads would be like asking SL merchants to start giving away their goodies for free.
Some will because it makes them feel good. Others won’t. I know many great blogs that don’t have ads. Maybe in the long run they will win over the ad whores by attracting all the readers. When this happens, we’ll see a readjustment of the model.
I do agree that the AdLab blog has horrible download times and I will have to do something about it very soon. Part of the reason is that I’m trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t, but in general, I am not apologetic about the AdLab ad clutter at all.
People who want the regular content get it through the full feed that comes without any ads. Few of them ever come to the site because they already have all the content they need, and that’s cool. There are a few sites that syndicate the content ad-lessly, and that’s fine, too.
People who do come to the site arrive either through links on other blogs or through Google while searching for something related. Those are the ones who click on the ads, and judging by the clickthroughs, at least some of them find the ads helpful.
I fully agree that ads in RSS suck, and they suck because they are ugly and irrelevant. I also don’t see a point of not including the entire content in the feed unless you run impression-based ads on your site and need all the eyeballs you can get.
P.S. Wait, are you turning off your own feed because of the advertising on other feeds?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have anything against advertising. It’s overly intrusive advertising that’s an issue to me. It’s advertising that doesn’t relate to the content. It’s advertisers forgetting about the consumer and thinking only of a metric. In my opinion, it’s inefficient because it’s one-sided. It’s strip mining with no regard for the landscape.
When advertising hits RSS the way AdSense and other automated advertising services have hit blogs, it’s going to be a greedy mess. The whole idea of what the blogosphere means to me is going to change. It’s going to go from being something by and for the People to something controlled by big business. I have no love for big business. I’d rather support small businesses; individual businesses.
To answer your question, I’m turning off the feed for a number of reasons that I discussed earlier ( https://blog.rebang.com/?p=798 ). As I said above, this is just another good – and related – reason.
You write that you blog for yourself and not for anyone’s entertainment, but since you are not running any ads on the site, I don’t see why you should be concerned with the content being syphoned out through the feed. It’s a bit like having your own radio station but insisting that only people who are in the studio can listen in.
If you need stats on your feed readership, create a redirect with FeedBurner and then have everyone resubscribe.
Oh, and I think I fixed the problem with download times. Thanks for bringing it up.
Don’t do it!
Sven, I won’t have time (or remember) to visit your blog everyday, but that doesn’t mean that scanning your articles in my feedreader isn’t valuable. As for ads – meh, I use Adblock. You can even block out the FeedFlare widgets if you want.
“I don’t see why you should be concerned with the content being syphoned out through the feed.”
Simple. If you read the link I posted and the Wired article, you’ll see that I have a problem with how information is flowing; how I believe people should do a little work to discover and learn things outside their selected areas. And in this post I’m basically saying that I don’t want my content mixing with ads from corporations I don’t like and wouldn’t support. If I’m generating content, I want to control who benefits from that content. As mentioned, I was hoping to promote some designers; now I’m interested in promoting independents. To me, that’s what the promise of the internet was all about – not corporations finding more ways to sell me stuff I don’t want.
“If you need stats on your feed readership, create a redirect with FeedBurner and then have everyone resubscribe.”
It was while considering this that I took another look at why I blog.
“Oh, and I think I fixed the problem with download times.”
Now that is good news. I’ll have to test it.
“Sven, I won’t have time (or remember) to visit your blog everyday”
I don’t visit every blog every day. When I first played around with getting a feed, I decided I liked hunting for things. That piece by Gil Bruvel you liked? I never would have found that otherwise bc it was just a background image on a website. I had to hunt for it.
Hunting is good. If people go hunting for information instead of coming here, I’ll be happy.
“As for ads – meh, I use Adblock. You can even block out the FeedFlare widgets if you want.”
You and I both know these are temporary solutions. The best option imo is simply to have a list of bookmarks/favorites and stop in from time to time. The more you like a site, the more often you visit. It’s organic instead of artificial. We could do with more of that imo.
Huh? I think perhaps you don’t understand how RSS feeds and newsreaders work. Ads don’t just magically appear in feeds. You, the publisher, have to decide to add them to your feed. Since you’re not likely to do so, you don’t have anything to worry about here. Your feed does not show up surrounded by ads, and won’t.
But if you cut the feed, I won’t be back, because of simple mathematics:
cost(time(reading csven’s feed)) value(reading csven’s feed);
The only way I’ll ever see the site again will be if somebody with a feed links to something you write, and since you don’t have a feed, I don’t know how they’ll ever find out about it.
You’ve provided some entertainment, but your mom is the only person who will bother to visit your page from a dead (not live) bookmark.
“Ads don’t just magically appear in feeds. You, the publisher, have to decide to add them to your feed.”
I’m well aware of that.
“Since you’re not likely to do so, you don’t have anything to worry about here. Your feed does not show up surrounded by ads, and won’t.”
Except for my personal interest in how information flows which we discussed previously. And my feed won’t have ads, but in some feed readers, my content might be sandwiched between ads coming from other sources to which someone subscribes. As stated, I know this won’t always occur, but it will likely occur some times. In worst case scenarios, someone will simply pull the feed and aggregate it on a webpage with ads. I’ve seen some of those as I’m sure you have as well.
“But if you cut the feed, I won’t be back, because of simple mathematics:”
Then I guess this is goodbye.
“since you don’t have a feed, I don’t know how they’ll ever find out about it.”
And why should I care?
“You’ve provided some entertainment, but your mom is the only person who will bother to visit your page from a dead (not live) bookmark.”
As I stated in the very beginning, I blog for me. Not for you. Not for my mother. If no one reads what I write, that’s perfectly fine. I’m not a journalist. I’m not an entertainer. And… I don’t visit your blog . Looks like a clean break.
All the best.