Re: Advertising in RSS feeds

On 22/10/2004 09:51, Julian Bond wrote:
> It's seems to me that advertising in RSS feeds is inevitable and it's 
> increasing. So rather than condemn it, does anyone have opinions on what 
> is the most acceptable and unobtrusive approach that still works as 
> advertising? And noting that we all hated web advertising until well 
> targeted short text ads appeared.
A problem with RSS advertising is that the primary use case for RSS 
content is aggregation and storage for long periods. Advertisers 
generally pay on a per-click basis and will have a set budget for an 
advertising campaign. Putting the ad in content means that the ad can 
persist in an aggregator's database long after the campaign budget has 
been used up. Getting bills for 12 month old campaigns is likely to 
annoy any advertiser.

Putting advertising out of band, e.g. in a separate tag has its own 
problems since you can't force anyone to display the ads. This would 
work if there was a mechanism for the RSS publisher to share some of the 
advertising revenue with the aggregators and feedreaders. This could be 
handled as a module:

<rss:channel rdf:about="blah">
   <rss:title>Recipe of the Day</rss:title>
   <ad:advert rdf:resource="#advert"/>
</rss:item>

<ad:Advert rdf:about="#advert">
   <rss:title>SpoonShop - spoons for all your needs</rss:title>
   <rss:link>http://spoonshop.com/buy-spoons.html</rss:link>
   <ad:button rdf:resource="http://spoonshop.com/button.jpg"/>
   <ad:banner rdf:resource="http://spoonshop.com/banner.jpg"/>
   <ad:publisherLink rdf:resource="http://adagency.com/"/>
   <ad:agentIdParameter>agent</ad:agentIdParameter>
</ad:Advert>

Here, the advert definition contains a text title, a button style ad and 
a banner ad. The client can choose the best format to display. The link 
is the clickthrough link.

The publisherLink is an identifier for the entity responsible for 
managing the ads, not necessarily the advertiser themselves.

The agentIdParameter is the name of a URL query parameter that the agent 
  should append to the clickthrough link and the image urls. The value 
of this parameter would be some sort of affiliate ID specific to the 
publisher. The author of the agent would have to have some sort of 
account with the publisher of course.

This module would allow feed readers to identify themselves if they want 
to show the ads and participate in some affiliate revenue. Those clients 
that don't want to show ads don't have to and those advertisers who 
don't want to share the revenue won't get their ads shown.

I'd like to take a quick straw poll of aggregator and feedreader authors 
- how many would be interested in supporting a module like this?

Ian





 
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