Advertising in Feeds
I’m not alone, Ian Landsman is also annoyed by Russell Beatties in-feed ads.
In feed ads have been showing up more frequently lately, and frankly there are a few problems with them.
- They’re almost always irrelevant; and
- They’re much more intrusive
The first problem is clearly a matter of tweaking FeedBurner’s algorithms, or a matter of Google’s AdSense or the Yahoo! Publisher Network getting into the business. I’d guess that picking relevant ads for feeds isn’t that different to picking them for pages.
The second problem is more serious though. One of the appeals of syndication is that I can view lots of disparate sources in one place with a consistent look and feel. I can download themes for my aggregator and customise the display of feeds to my heart’s content. If your advertisments can’t fit in with that, then they’re a pain in the ass and I’ll either unsubscribe from your feed, or block the ads themselves.
Images and coloured blocks of text will almost always clash with my chosen theme, so what are the alternatives? I’ve noticed that Weblogs Inc. has recently started inserting plain text footers into their feeds. These fit in perfectly with my aggregator, but I’d expect their CPM is pretty low.
In short, I don’t know what the solution is, but I do know that I don’t like the current generation of in-feed ads. So far Russell’s is the only feed that I’ve remained subscribed to. His content is good enough to justify it, few others can say the same.
Dick Costolo April 15th, 2005 @ 01:59 PM
Hi Koz. Your points are well taken, and your second point is one of the reasons we have kept this in trials and haven’t released yet. We are not content with the intrusiveness and current form factor. There are a couple of reasons we convert to a graphic instead of dropping in text. While the bottom line may be “who cares if they’re intrusive”, it’s nonetheless interesting to understand the logic behind it. The reason we convert to graphics on the contextual ads is because networks like Yahoo and Google and other contextual marketplaces are just that, real-time marketplaces. As such, ads must rotate frequently as some run out of budget and others get slotted in. If we were driving text into the placements, the feed would appear updated, and people would constantly look at “new” items that were just old items with new ads. Not good at all. NONETHELESS, if we are making the user experience too intrusive with images that are too large and out of bounds from the current user experience, then the benefits of not updating the feed are lost in a deteriorating user experience. We have left things “as is” for a while during the trial so that we can get as much feedback as possible on a baseline frame of reference. We will be trying some different things shortly. In any case, we are cognizant of the issues, not ignoring them; if it’s an issue that we don’t address successfully and in the near term, I’m certain that somebody else will, so it ill behoves us to ignore the challenge.