Kevin's Weblog

It looks like the issue of inline advertising in RSS feeds is getting a lot of attention lately, with posts from Jeremy and John Battelle. I’m sort of surprised that Jeremy seems so hesitant about the concept. Personally, I’m really excited at the prospect of us getting into this area. But then, I work for the money-making part of the company so I’m used to viewing the web in a more commercial way than most. I also find the technical challenges of the problem really interesting.

There are some things I worry about, though. The main one is how various aggregators will react to this. I can imagine that some aggregators without another revenue model might want to put contextual advertising of their own beside feed content. The risk here is that the total quantity of advertising does go over some line and people rebel. Another thing that might happen is that aggregators might try to block ad content in feeds. Particularly if this is combined with them adding their own ads, I could see this leading to some nasty legal fights.