4 ms·

Lack of a good client is not the issue here. RSS needs to either add a standard way to serve ads or some sort of revenue model. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense

Lack of a good client is not the issue here. RSS needs to either add a standard way to serve ads or some sort of revenue model. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense for most publishers to adopt or maintain it.

aeorgnoieang 8y ago
Why does RSS need "a standard way to serve ads"? Feed content can easily include ads.
- nie 8y ago
  So 'we' can block it. NLP for ads detection would be disastrous as a problem to tackle. And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs.
  - aeorgnoieang 8y ago
    The comment to which I was replying claimed that it was necessary for publishers to adopt RSS. I'm pretty sure they were thinking that, if RSS had some kind of standard way to increase the probability of ads being seen, publishers would adopt it more widely (and that's probably true). My point is that feed content can already include ads as regular text or images or whatever. Feed readers and aggregators complicate ad-tracking, but not ads themselves (like what newspapers and magazines have used for decades [or centuries]). Some of my favorite feeds are sites with plain ads and the advertisers seem to be targeting the site's audience instead of individuals. That seems to work well enough given that it's existed in its current form for several years now at least. > And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs. We're probably writing past each other. I think you're imagining a much more widespread adoption of RSS in which this would be a real problem. Or maybe I'm just weird. But I don't see the problem with, e.g. following a feed of someone's Twitter activity that includes an (obvious) ad every n feed items for some suitable value of n. And my imagined world wouldn't require any changes to RSS.

aeorgnoieang 8y ago

Why does RSS need "a standard way to serve ads"? Feed content can easily include ads.

nie 8y ago
So 'we' can block it. NLP for ads detection would be disastrous as a problem to tackle. And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs.
- aeorgnoieang 8y ago
  The comment to which I was replying claimed that it was necessary for publishers to adopt RSS. I'm pretty sure they were thinking that, if RSS had some kind of standard way to increase the probability of ads being seen, publishers would adopt it more widely (and that's probably true). My point is that feed content can already include ads as regular text or images or whatever. Feed readers and aggregators complicate ad-tracking, but not ads themselves (like what newspapers and magazines have used for decades [or centuries]). Some of my favorite feeds are sites with plain ads and the advertisers seem to be targeting the site's audience instead of individuals. That seems to work well enough given that it's existed in its current form for several years now at least. > And if users need to spend considerable effort to distinguish ads from actual content, the tech-platform will soon die due to angry mobs. We're probably writing past each other. I think you're imagining a much more widespread adoption of RSS in which this would be a real problem. Or maybe I'm just weird. But I don't see the problem with, e.g. following a feed of someone's Twitter activity that includes an (obvious) ad every n feed items for some suitable value of n. And my imagined world wouldn't require any changes to RSS.