On February 22nd, I sent an email to Chris Tolles, vice president of marketing at Topix.net. Basicly, I asked “Why are you delivering advertisements through the RSS feed?” Here was his answer:
Well, to answer your question directly — why are we putting ads in the RSS feed? Well, so we can monetize the RSS subscriptions. We make no money on delivering people to the actual news sites here, so we’ve been experimenting with monetizing the RSS feed (this is about the sixth ad we’ve done via RSS).
However, given that the ad had nothing to do with the subject in which you’re interested, I take the feedback that this is a pretty poor experience. We’re going to have to monetize the RSS here somehow — but a non-contextual ad on our hyper contextualized feed pretty much bites, I’ll grant you
This is one of a series of experiments — I, personally, have been pretty public about working the issues here (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1668385,00.asp). So, I’d ask you to bear with us as we crack the code on making this stuff work for everyone. For my part, I take the feedback seriously, and will likely yank this particular ad off of some of the places we have it now, and think a little harder about what we should be doing with ads in RSS.
Mind you — I’d like to monetize RSS (since we’re an aggregator, we don’t make any money off of the article content), and hand you directly to the content, without any other ads here. If you think that you’ll simply drop any feed with advertising, you’ll probably leave us at some point — but I’d hope that when we get ads rolling for real, that they actually make sense, and look more like content (in fact, given that we’re getting some folks to pay us for placement, they may *be* content, albeit called out as ads).
In any case, we’re open to feedback, and appreciate the note — hope you stay on…you know where to reach me here.
His answer was very well taken by me, but the fact that he feels that he’d like to monetize RSS in order to remove the ads from the actual web sites is not the right way to think. If you have to take a chance at “losing” subscribers to your webfeed just because people don’t want to see the ads, it still counts as “subscribers lost”. There are a lot of other factors that could be figured into this, however. The frequency of non-content advertisements, and anything that may be misleading could all factor into the big question of staying subscribed to an RSS feed.
Others have been trying this, as well, with varying outcomes. I hope to interview a few of them and find out the status, and how things are working, soon.