John Chow started the trend of Selling raw Text links in RSS Feeds and there will be a lot of followers doing this as well. When he first posted that he is going to sell RSS Text ads, i thought it would be a single text link in each post. But, i was shocked to find what it actually was. That was very annoying. He has done it with the help of Feed Footer plugin. Check out :
What is more annoying is that he even runs his banner as on RSS Feeds. The style=”float: right;” doesn’t work on the feed reader and makes it more annoying.
So, the question arises. Is it worth running ads on RSS feeds despite such annoyance ? Is John Chow planning to draw his users from the Feed Reader to main site by stuffing it with ads ? Only John knows the answers.
You ask, “So, i shouldn’t be running ads on Feeds ?”. Of course, you can. Make it clean and not as annoying as John’s is. TechCrunch runs 468 x 60 banner ads(by feedburner) in the RSS feeds and i don’t find them annoying. Darren Rowse leaves an affiliate link on the bottom of every post on RSS feed. I don’t find them annoying either. I really advice that you think twice before starting to run Ads on Feeds. John Chow has a loyal reader base. He isn’t going to lose any readers by doing this. But, its not the case with everyone. It would be better to make a post asking your readers if the find the ads annoying.
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I have to agree. 5 links is just way too much at the bottom of a feed.
I’m ok with the inline ad, however.
Liberty and New Creation wrote on September 5th, 2007 at 12:36 am
