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my current experience with ads in rss

Now that this is becoming such a huge topic and i've been quoted/misquoted/shortquoted in the press etc ( i think the full quote was something like "A lot of these publishers have a business model of ads on their HTML sites, and a lot of people read a lot of the same content in the RSS feeds and never go to the HTML website - and our publishers are telling us that their readers are telling them more and more that they want full text in their RSS feeds because they like the experience of reading everything in one tool, their RSS reader." ) I wanted to offer my perspective on the subject as I deal with a lot of feed publishers on a daily basis.

The first thing i'll say is that it's that there are a lot of bloggers out there who write to me/us on a daily basis and want to make money off of their feed. I'm sure there are also a large number of bloggers that don't. Some of them want to do it via advertising, some of them want to do it via affiliate marketing, and some want to do it via a subscription model.

Here's where I see personal publishing business models landing over the long term at an equilibrium (and no one who states this is inventing this, it has ALL been said before).

Publishers who are currently getting paid for their content in some way will likely offer one or more of the following feeds to their readers:

1) A full content feed with some sort of contextual advertising or sponsorship

2) A summary feed that is advertising free and links back to the site (this is the dave winer "the feed is the advertising" model)

3) A full content feed that is provided under some monthly subscription model whether bundled into a pay aggregation service such as newsgator or provided by server software or intermediary service (down the road, but coming soon)

4) A full content feed that is provided under some pennies-per-click to read model (way down the road)

I'm not saying any of these are right or better for the greater good of the "blogosphere" but that's the equilibrium that i think publishers will land at with their readers/subscribers. That's very important. This is between publishers and their subscribers. If a publisher loses some percentage of their subscribers because they put ads in their feeds, but gains an income stream from the rest that don't mind, it is up to the publisher to determine which is worth more to them: a larger number of subscribers or a fewer number that supports the model financially.

If you are reading this via my feed, you know i've been messing around with all sorts of advertising here for months in both the feed and my HTML. I've been doing this semi-scientifically. I can tell you a couple things: 1) my subscriber base continues to grow and 2) I make more money when advertising in both the feed and the blog HTML than just in the HTML alone.

Does anyone like advertising in their media? I don't think so, but most people tolerate it up to a point because they understand it's necessary to fund services they might otherwise not enjoy.

I for instance am an XM radio subscriber. I choose to pay a subscription fee because advertising on the radio has gotten out of hand AND i think the content is much better. Are subscriptions a viable business model for XM and sirius? Not yet. Is advertising a viable business model for terrestrial/analog radio? yes, it seems to be. but this is another market that has not yet reached an equilibrium because the satellite companies are not profitable and subscription fees clearly do not outweigh the costs yet. XM recently got rid of ads in their broadcasts perhaps because a number of OEM cars were released, perhaps because they thought ad free radio is their competitive edge.

I wish there were a happy medium. Digital quality radio with some reasonable level of commercials and perhaps a low subscription fee. Business models for RSS/Atom i think will reach this happy medium quicker because there are so many more publishers and subscribers.

At any rate, i don't plan to get involved to or react to any of this from a religious perspective - such things are rarely productive. I will continue to be involved in this as it is part of my job/company and i am interested in it from a legal perspective. Such things such as "if i'm a publisher and i put ads in my feeds, does that become part of my copyrighted content? if someone uses my content without the advertising, is that violating my copyright?" are pretty interesting to me so i can't wait to see where that goes.

ciao.

--steve