Advertising and Syndication

Phil has a great post on ‘monetizing RSS subscribers’. This is something I’ve been thinking about ever since boingboing added ads to their feeds. I’m not going to take the extreme step of unsubscribing from feeds with ads, but I’ll definitely look less favourably on advertising riddled feeds.

I don’t intend to put ads in my feeds. Feeds are only used by my regular readers, the kind of people who recommend my site to their friends, link to me from their own site and help me grow my readership. These are not the people I want to annoy, I want more of them not fewer. Perhaps my opinion would be different if my readership was a high as BoingBoing’s. Another downside of ads in general is shown by 37signals’, their ads are for competing web design firms. Probably not what they’re after.

After reading Phil’s post I’ve realised that I’m a ‘search farmer’, I think I’ll tweak my adsense layout accordingly.