advertising in syndicated feeds

[dave.cantrell@gunter.af.mil]

All,

What do you think about sites including advertising in their XML feeds?

I ask this because of Mike Krus' statement [1]:

  Hence the paypal thing. Advertising helps paying for the
  people how use the site, but RSS exports yeald no revenue
  what so ever. And it's getting more hits every day...

I really like the cool innovative uses of RSS in syndicating e-mail topics
[2], syndicating forum postings [3], syndicating search results [4], etc.

However, Mike's statement was right in line with something I've been
wondering about more and more lately: if we truly move to a syndicated world
where you can aggregate news (and forum posts and searches and...) then why
would you want to visit the aggregating site at all?

Where is the business model for the site that provides these feeds?

I like Moreover's approach -- give away some for free, and charge for custom
feeds. This seems a great approach, but what about places like Google? I
like Sherch's idea, but I I can't help but think it would be better if
Google hosted this capability themselves.

But why should they host it if they can't show ads?

Now, we could pretend an <ad></ad> element is added to the feed, but then
very few people would really display that, unless the providing site
mandated it in their license for using the service, and even then it would
be pretty much ignored.

The only answers I can come up with are:

(a) Embed the ad as an <item> just like the rest
(b) Charge for the feed

While (a) probably seems "unfair", it's the only viable answer I can come up
with that could keep the feed free. Now, there are workarounds even if (a)
is chosen. If the ad is the first <item>, consumers could just skip it and
display items 2..n and therefore skip the ad. This could be partially
overcome by embedding the ad randomly in the feed, but the countermeasure
for that would be to filter based on URL -- presumably an ad would point
back to the generator's web site (for tracking) or perhaps a third party
(like DoubleClick) rather than another site.

Has anybody thought about this issue? Is it even an issue at all?

Thanks,
-dave


[1] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication/message/1887
[2] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/syndication/messages?rss=1
[3] http://network54.com/Hide/Forum/27252;xml=rss
[4]
http://www.sherch.com/~pldms/cgi-bin/CIA_World_Factbook.rss?searchterm=kosov
o