Advertising on the web is more or less an accepted fact of life. Things have to get paid for some how and often that “how” is via advertising (at least in part). With more and more content being viewed via feeds (RSS & Atom) the advertising discussion has been focusing more on how to advertise in feeds in addition to websites. The debate over advertising in feeds is going along in much the same way that advertising on websites did.
At first there was something of a backlash to sites with advertising, that they had some how sold out and should be shunned. Gradually this attitude has drifted away, with only those who really want to avoid ads still making use of browser plugins or proxy servers that filter out ads. It is still fairly early in feed advertising game and we are still in the backlash stage. Most feeds (at least the ones I read) don’t have advertising, but there are some. Those who are doing it (like Russell) often use FeedBurner to insert ads.
That seems to have changed now. Slashdot, the old man of geek sites, has started including ads in their feeds. With more than 30,000 people subscribed to Slashdot on Bloglines, the number of people exposed to feed advertising is going to increase significantly. This will likely increase the heat in the debate over advertising in feeds. In the end I believe that ads in feeds will become less of an issue and more of an accepted norm for most people.
Much of the discussion about ads in feeds will continue to focus on how to do it. For websites Google AdSense pretty much rules the market. This is a rather unfortunate situation, I’d like to see more competition in this area. There is the possibility that Yahoo! Publisher Network will provide this, but so far this isn’t an available option the same way that AdSense is. So that seems to leave most of us with FeedBurner as the only serious option for feed advertising. I don’t think that will be the case in the long term. In the long term I suspect that FeedBurner will get absorbed by someone else with much deeper pockets. Although the likely targets might seem to be Google (combined with AdSense) or Yahoo! (combined with their Publisher Network), I don’t think it will be either one. Although both Google and Yahoo! should make feed ads an option in using their services.
I think the mostly likely buyer is someone much closer to the feed end of the equation. I’m thinking of Bloglines (now owned by Jeeves) as one of the most likely to buy out FeedBurner. This would actually give Bloglines a business model (which so far seems to consist of simply selling out to someone else) and would be a good fit for FeedBurner because Bloglines already gets the idea of feeds and how they work. I’m not going to bet money on it, but this is where my gut says FeedBurner should be.
Speaking of Bloglines, I never did get my I love Bloglines shirt.
UPDATE 3:20pm 26 Apr 2005: I’m not getting the ads in the Slashdot feed that I read via Bloglines anymore. Perhaps this was just an experiment?