Tim Flight

For those of you that might have missed Google’s announcement this week, they will soon be offering a way to inject advertisements into RSS feeds. This could certainly shake things up in the world of RSS feeds.

When I explain RSS/XML/Atom feeds to people I often talk about how I can read the headlines from dozens of websites in seconds and view no advertisements. I can no longer make that statement. It was only a matter of time before it would happen and I was probably just a naive rural Maine boy to think RSS would remain virgin to advertisements.

Google has also graciously provided a Best Practices for Adsense for Feeds which makes some interesting points. When I first saw “Adsense for Feeds” I was anticipating advertisements interwoven as individual posts rather than just ad the end of each post. They also recognize that the news reader/aggregator is becoming an alternative to the web-browser by suggesting that if your website has a privacy policy or terms and conditions that you should be including links at the end of your posts. That is a pretty valid point. There are probably two dozen feeds I read daily that I no longer directly visit the respective website… ever.

Could I please have a side of AdSense with my RSS please?

This entry was posted on Friday, May 20th, 2005 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Website Development. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.