Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web has posted an in-depth analysis of the issues surrounding contextual advertising in RSS aggregators. This is the very heart of the matter I blogged about a few days ago. (Doc Searls thoughts)
Richard asks: in what situations is contextual advertising OK? and goes on to offer some scenarios.
Jason Calacanis discussed this issue in December of 2004 under the subject of RSS Abuse.
It’s one thing to take headlines.
It’s one thing to take an excerpt—like the good folks at Google, Topix.net, Feedster or Technorati do—to help people navigate.
It’s a whole other thing to take your entire feed, wrap your own ads around it, and try to sell a service on top of the content!
Somebody needs to create a product to provide RSS feed owners a percentage of the advertising revenue from sites that syndicate their content. Feedburner?
Visitor Comments
We are on top of this and are investigating tools and services to address this very issue. There are a growing number of these sites, publishers are generally unaware of the issue (at least as regards the number of these sites that exist), and there is little or no way for the personal publisher to track their content as its repurposed with surrounding ads. A perfect thing for us to deal with.
Posted by: Dick Costolo | February 13, 2005 8:46 PM