Overture Dipping Toe Into RSS Advertising

Posted Nov 18th 2004 9:41AM by Brad Hill

overture rss ad

Reports are surfacing that Yahoo!'s Overture division is experimenting with placing contextual text ads into RSS feeds. John Battelle put his nose on the story first, and CNET is also following the trail today. Jason Fried, author of the Signal vs. Noise blog, claims to be running Overture-provided ads in his feed right now. (The graphic in this entry is clipped from Fried's blog; there is no visual verification that Overture is the source. FeedBurner powers ad placement in the Signal vs. Noise blog.) Read Fried's comment section for a push-pull debate of the RSS-ad issue.

Reader Comments

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1. Not a totally thought out idea I think. It could work but only if its not on all the feeds from a content source AND the subscriber knows about it.

What would work is a feed that is all ads. I think this way it would force ads to be more information based and helpful to consumers rather than "hey look at me! I'm glowing and on sale!" type ads.

It would be far better if RSS ad feeds worked like Google Text banners such that the information diplayed is HELPFUL to the person who is looking at it. I would love to have an RSS feed that has HELPFUL ads rather than caveman ads and non related products on my webpage.

If they make it related to the feed, related to the site, and make the ads educational and/or information based then ok, give it a shot. Otherwise it will be a doomed project.

Posted at 4:46AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Phil

2. Ads are bad enough, but ads that cover the content are unacceptable. Instead of ads in the feeds, I would rather see summaries in the feeds and leave the ads on the site. Write the summary well and people will click through to read the rest and see the ad there.
It's less annoying for the user and probably gets the ad seen by more people.

Posted at 4:46AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Peter

3. Sorry, I thought the ad above was a live ad in your feed. It still needs to be placed better, something is causing the text to wrap oddly around it.
I still stand by my idea of using summaries in the feeds and leaving the ads on the web site.

Posted at 4:46AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Peter

4. If leaving ads on the site was making publishers enough money to continue publishing, they wouldn't have to experiment with ads in feeds. Who wouldn't rather see summaries in feeds and ads on sites? But what if your preference means your favorite sites have to shut down?

Posted at 4:46AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Brian

5. Brian - You give advertisers too much credit. They will stick ads anywhere people don't complain about it. If publishers can't survive without excessive and intrusive ads, they need a better business model.

Posted at 4:46AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Peter

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