TUAW RSS Feed Gets Google Adsense

Ads placed in an RSS feed are counter to the philosophy and raison d'etre of RSS. The subsrciber of the site's RSS feed will eventually see ads... if the summarized articles are of interest to the reader they'll go to the site and be exposed to the ads. Do you readers really think that the current ads in the RSS feed will not grow in size, complexity and annoyance as time goes on? Wake up! This ad placement policy will destroy the appeal of RSS! You are seeing the start of it now on TUAW!

I'll ask again then: Why the Shell are those ads images?

Say hello to Adsense TOS: "Web pages may not include incentives of any kind for users to click on ads. This includes encouraging users to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers' sites as well as ***drawing any undue attention*** to the ads. This activity is strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as "click here," "support us," "visit these links," or other similar language that could apply to any ad, regardless of content." (asterisks mine)

Dear paul and Dave Taylor, you are right. RSS is a right, not a privilege. Weblogs Inc owes you. So much. After all you have done for them. And ads just make the whole RSS completely unreadable. They should have asked you first, those selfish greedy bastards!. That's why you UNSUBSCRIBE. And you are right: everything should be free. Everything. Always. Please email you address to Weblogs Inc and Laurie will bring you a beer every day and give you a massage while you read your RSS feeds...

So I decided to give you all the benefit of the doubt and clicked on one of these ads, Safari launches and I get a web page that says "You must be running Internet Explorer to view this pages web content" popped up. I am still laughing. Don't think those ads are gonna do much good for Mac users...

Sorry, hate it. Unsubscribing from your RSS feed (unless I can get the fine folk at NewsGator to install a blocking script) and blogging about the commercial pollution of the RSS information space too. Very disappointing, Weblogs, Inc. Very disappointing.

C.K., Scott and I had a meeting last week about how badly we wanted to keep doing favors for paul but we decided against it :) The ugly truth is that we're all greedy moguls who hope to finance new cars, large NYC apartments and tropical vacations off this gig and the lack of ads in the RSS feeds were getting in the way of that. Anyone have a problem with that?

The blog you guys have here could be done with any free blog software out there (Wordpress, MovableType, etc). If you chose to develop your own, then any money you spent is your own fault. I never said you guys were swindling us, I just felt the explanation was stated in corporate speak. The ads on RSS feeds will add to profits, and that's all I wanted mentioned. But you guys were pretending like you were doing us a favor. You're not. Go ahead and take away the RSS feed, and then watch all your visitors go away.

Answering a few of these fine comments: 1. We don't put the number of comments in the feeds since that would make them update all day long and sensitive feed readers (which means all of them) would constantly reload our posts and anger our readers. 2. RSS feeds ignore JavaScript. 3. Sage has a problem with the ads. I don't know if it's the PNG format or some other Sage-specific thing, but that's the only feed reader I've seen the images fail like that in. Opera I'll look into... Thanks!

Paul, relax. First off, we're not running free blog software. We're running off of our own software. That costs money and time to create and maintain. Secondly, RSS feeds, especially on large traffic sites like those in the Weblogs, Inc. network take up quite a bit of bandwidth and bandwidth costs money. We're not trying to swindle anyone. We're not saying we need to do this to stay afloat. We're simply saying we need to do this to leverage the costs of maintaining these high traffic RSS feeds. Plus, it's friggin' cool that we're flagshipping a new form of Google Adsense.