RSS ads: salvation or Pandora’s Box?
According to a DMNEWS report, contextual advertising firm Kanoodle has struck a distribution deal with news aggregator Feedster to sprinkle paid listings in Feedster’s feeds of search results.
Feedster, San Francisco, which indexes more than 8,000 news sources, lets users have their searches sent to them through the Really Simple Syndication feed. Feedster already displays paid search listings on its Web site through Yahoo’s Overture Services. Its search feeds will include Kanoodle’s ContextTarget listings labeled as advertisements.Feedster will offer its users the option of paying $10 per year, via PayPal, to receive an ad-free RSS feed.
The impetus for the expansion is the maturing of the search market. A Jupiter Research forecast for the search market released this month concluded that most of the industry’s growth would come from price increases, since supply continues to lag demand for search listings.
“We believe content is a real solution to the supply problem,” said Mark Josephson, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Kanoodle. “We really view RSS as an extension of content.”
Feedster also will sell its own sponsorships for some of the RSS feeds, while using the Kanoodle contextual pay-per-click ads for its nonsponsored search feeds, Scott Rafer, Feedster president and CEO said.Within the next three weeks, Feedster will start incorporating the sponsored links in its feeds. It will clearly label the ads, which will appear as every sixth headline in the RSS feeds, Rafer said. While it will start with the feeds generated from search results, Rafer said Feedster eventually will expand the ads to other feeds as well.
It is the purity of RSS and the control it gives users that makes it so attractive. Cluttering it up with spam is counter to that, and I think it runs against the foundational principles of the Web. I support branded readers completely, but mucking with the feed content crosses my line.
If I want an ad feed, I’ll subscribe to one.
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