eWeek RSS Feeds Now Include Advertisements

I subscribe to several of the RSS feeds provided by Ziff Davis' eWeek, including their messaging news feed. Today, one of the articles that came through the feed was ADV: Learn more about a Xerox Phaser® 8400 and WIN a 50" HDTV. Last Month, Ed asked what will happen when RSS feeds start to include advertising? Interestingly enough, he cited eWeek's own Steve Gillmor as one of the strong proponents of RSS's ascendancy over email. I wonder what Steve thinks about his publication's decision to include ads in their feeds?

NetworkWorldFusion's Executive Editor Adam Gaffin responded to Ed in his own blog, asking the question "How does a for-profit company (raises hand here) whose main product is information create a return on its investment in RSS?" I could have sworn that I posted a response on Adam's blog, but it's not there. Perhaps I'm mis-remembering, or perhaps it was something a bit obnoxious and Adam chose to remove it. I have to admit that that's possible, because if I remember the gist of it, my post was going to compare RSS/on-line media with printed trade mags, and I was suggesting that RSS feeds serve the same purpose as the front page and table of contents of the print magazine, and that publishers manage to make money despite the fact that the front page and table of contents of the printed magazines enable many readers to skip past the vast majority of advertising content... And maybe pointing out to advertisers that the many readers never see their ads might not be something that Adam wanted on his site, and I can understand that. Also, my tone might have been taken the wrong way.

NetworkWorld, by the way, is an IDG publication, not Ziff Davis, and I also subscribe to quite a few of NetworkWorld's feeds (Adam's being one of them), and I find them very useful. I certainly believe that NetworkWorldFusion, and eWeek for that matter, are entitled to earn a return from the information that they sell. As Adam pointed out, advertising is one way they can do that, but he put forth some interesting ideas for other ways, as well. My response to him should have conveyed the point that I think that the ads that we see when we click-through to the article pages ought to support the cost of the feeds, and given that the trade mag feeds don't tend to contain more than a one-sentence synopsis, so click-through rates should be fairly high, but perhaps I didn't get that across clearly.

Frankly, I'm not all that disturbed by the appearance of a single ad in one of the eWeek feeds. Ed suggested that it's "game over" when this happens, but I'm not convinced. After all, it wasn't an advertisement for anatomical enhancements, mortgages, or counterfeit pharaceuticals. I admit that I'm a bit mystified by targeting an ad for laser printers at the messaging news feed, but I guess it's not really that far off the mark. If it becomes a more than a once-a-day thing, and if they start pulling tricks like changing the unique id of the article every time the feed is generated in order to make sure that it keeps re-appearing as a new unread item, then I'd probably unsubscribe from some of their feeds, but maybe not all. Advertisement, if it is well-targeted, isn't all evil. I don't carry any ads here, but if anyone thinks that I'm blogging purely for the joy of it and out of the goodness of my heart, with no motivation at all toward increasing my visibility as a consultant in my field... well... despite the fact that the majority of my posts are not technical and some even touch on controversial political issues... those people are mistaken.

Update: Ed has already blogged about this.