Friday, May 22, 2009

RSS being ruined by huge ads

Picture 1.pngI've been thinking a lot about my use of RSS for news.

Dave Winer's recent podcasts "Rebooting the news" are fascinating to a news junkie like me.

One thing that is spoiling my appreciation of RSS is the recent appearance of very large, tall ads in the feeds.

I can understand that the sources need to make money from their news, even Rupert does, but if the ads are much bigger than the content, you drive me away very fast.

Looks like it's time for the ad blocker, but that seems to be a pity because I value my feed authors.

Settle down a bit folks!

2 comments:

David said...

I don't happen to follow Slashdot but their feed does seem a bit ad heavy. I don't mind the text ads, but as you noted, the image ads seem out of place. The only place in the many feeds I seem to notice ads at all is Dilbert.

Alan Yates said...

Yeah enclosures can be used for both good and evil.

I guess it is a sign that advertisers have finally caught on that many people never visit the home sites any more, they just browse the feeds. Yet another good reason to put quality content out there to actually drive page views and not flood the feeds with annoying ads that will just turn people off.