Advertising and Feedreaders (again!)
Posted on September 20, 2005
Filed Under Business |
NOTE: This post has been sitting unpublished for awhile now…so I decided to go ahead ready or not…
Alex King and co. are developing a new web based feedreader, Feedlounge, which looks really promising.
But they will have a challenge when it comes to making money out of it if they need to use advertising to support the free version. Alex has posted his thoughts on the subject here.
The problem is this legal gray area around placing advertising around feed content. I have been through this myself and ended up closing down Rollup.org, because I didn’t want to get off side with publishers and it seemed to me there is a fundemental problem with putting advertising around feeds, regardless of whether the advertising is contextual or not.
Alex points out some examples of using ads around content to support the provision of a service, but I don’t think that these examples, services like gmail or forums, are relevant. Sure, gmail places contextual ads next to your content, ie. content you own the copyright to. But this was explicit from the start…you signed up to use the service knowing that this was part of the deal. Likewise any content you create and contribute to a forum or via a free (ad supported) blogging service. In these kinds of examples you knew that ads were part of the equation.
However, if you run a blog and provide a feed, you have the right to provide that feed for non commercial puposes only. Even if that feed is not full text you have the right to insist that it is only used for non commercial puposes. In this scenario it is not cool for someone to syndicate your RSS feed onto their own “aggregator blog” around which they place ads. And I think it is similarly not cool for a web based RSS aggregator to put ads around your feed content aswell…that the aggregator is trying to monetise the service (and not the content) is irrelevant…you provided your feed for non commerical purposes.
For me the test is to ask yourself if you would be happy for your feed content to be aggregated on another web site, along with a few other feeds, and surrounded by Google Adsense? Arguably the site is providing a service by aggregating the related content into one place, but I don’t think that justifies the use of Adsense to make money off others’ content.
The Opera example is an interesting one because they ran the ad supported model for a long time, but the recent announcement makes this irrelevant now. I wonder if they felt themselves butting up aginst the same issue, highlited perhaps by the increasing number of web based feed readers raising awareness (?).
Feedreaders potentially reduce the content owners ability to monetize traffic. I might produce a feed with intro’s only and I don’t want to include ads in my feed because the summary items are ads in themselves for my content (which you have to visit the site to see). Or I might produce full content feeds and provide these for non commerical purposes, ie. it is not cool for anyone else to use the feed to make $$. The only feasible model for feed readers then is to charge for them…or get acquired by some larger web concern where they can become a portal feature rather than a profit center in their own right ;)
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