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Tuesday, November 23, 2004

Ads Inside RSS: Good's Advice

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Staci Kramer from PaidContent.org reports: "While some of us are wondering how best to use ads in RSS feeds, IT Garage proprietor Doc Searls asked "How long before somebody designs an RSS newsreader that blocks ads in RSS feeds?"

He quickly got a reply from someone who already has figured out an RSS ad hack and someone else working on one. It's all part of the inevitable tug-of-war between publishers who want to make money and users looking for control. One alternative: offer those who don't want ads the chance to subscribe for a reasonable fee. And one suggestion -- to gain acceptance for ads, don't clutter up feeds with multiple ads or multiple copies of the same ad in a 24-hour hour or the ads quickly will be seen as a nuisance instead of the "price" gaining access to the feed."

What is your advice?

Can you live with ads inside RSS feeds?

RGeyes.jpg

Here is my take on it.

Though I myself am a purist and would truly love to see content without any advertising at all, the market forces at work right now and the need for publishers (especially small ones) to keep their online operations sustainable make it altogether unlikely that you will be able to keep your RSS feeds ad-free for much longer.

As we have seen for other communication technologies, Web, mobile phones, SMS, P2P it is only a matter of time before the advertising paradigm gets integrated into the new communication medium.

While I strongly believe that this is not the only way to create sustainability around information services, I have little influence over the market and the traditional advertising mentality much overrides the enormous complementary marketing opportunities that are emerging on the sides.

I will therefore take it on me to be guinea pig for some new innovative approaches to promotion which I hope to be starting to unleash in the first part of 2005, and as I have done, will do my best to further understand and discover how to best leverage advertising as such when you have no other way of providing profitable return for your content.

Here my suggestions on how to best introduce ads inside RSS feeds without alienating readers and while providing a credible/effective promotion/exposure to your advertisers:

1) Take responsibility for who you are promoting. Test the system that provides the ads in your RSS feed(s). Make a few pilot runs privately and see how it works. See what you think of the ads that show up. If they suck, don't do it. If they "medium"-suck, don't do it either. If the ads are great and you feel proud of carrying ads for those products that show up go for it. If the ads truly enhance and complement your content mission in that RSS feed, you just made Bingo.

2) Do not interrupt. Reserve a section for these ads. Stop thinking of them as ads actually. The more you think of them as ads the more you are going to adopt strategies that belonged to traditional advertising but need not apply to your new media channels. They need not to interrupt. Stop playing that nasty traditional game: you give me a good thing while you distract me with another one you want to sell me. Come on, let's get out of this silly game. Rather, think of the ads as complementary "selected" info for your readers. (Yeah, I know it really sucks that publishers cannot select themselves the individual advertisers they want to endorse, but for the time being we can live with this.) Therefore organize one or more dedicated sections in which they appear. Both before and after the content, depending on the style of your publication and your target audience, may work well.

3) Use only text-based ads. No banners, no visuals, no animations, no icons, no sounds. Text information only.

4) Use only factual information in those ads. What is it, what it does, how much does it cost, where I can find more info, etc.. Ban, if possible, all hype-oriented copy and uninformative headlines and ad texts.

5) Expose and endorse the ad-supply mechanism you utilize (Google AdSense, Kanoodle, Overture, etc.) explaining to your readers how those ads have ended up on your site, who selects them, how important they are to you, and even how to get their product to appear within them if you wished to.

6) Offer an easy way for your readers to place their products and services in your ad system. The more direct and easy, the better. Give them a free set of runs to test and "feel" and then once they have gotten the good taste of the targeted traffic you bring to them, you charge them a fair price to show up there.

7) Free yourself from major ad clearinghouses who require exclusivity and do not allow you to promote your favourite products. Most of them contracts that put them in a position to cancel your revenue and earnings without any official justification. If you build all of your strength on them, and they suddenly drop you, what are you going to do? Lean gradually away from them. Try to build-up your own small clearinghouse, maybe in partnership with a group of sites that share your same goals, content mission or audiences.


Reference: PaidContent.org [ Read more ]
 
 
 
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posted by Robin Good on Tuesday, November 23 2004, updated on Tuesday, May 5 2015


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