Google has extended its AdSense program to RSS feeds. They’re not the first to insert ads into RSS streams, of course (see Feedburner and BoingBoing for notable prior art) but as a massive force in online advertising you can bet it’s a significant move.
Ads bring two benefits to the blogger: revenue and insight. Not insight into whatever topic the blog is about, but insight into the readership. The Radar RSS feed uses FeedBurner Pro to learn what people read and what they don’t care about (this just in: APIs hot; what I had for lunch, not so much). An arms race between Google (who just bought a site analytics company) and the other vendors can only lead to better tools for people who run web sites.
But ads are controversial. RSS became popular partially because it let you view web sites without the associated crap. Advertising is the associated crap, but also (in theory) pays for the site. So naturally it migrated into the RSS stream. However, RSS is a very malleable format (compare Flash) and it’s relatively simple to strip ads. I’m amazed I can’t find a Bayesian plugin for any popular desktop feedreader to let me junk the ads the way Mail.app lets me junk spam. So, of course, it’ll happen in a distributed fashion with aps like RSSAdFilter.
An interesting side-effect of Google as advertising intermediary is that the corruptive influence of advertising is greatly reduced. That is, a traditional newsmaker would be wary of sending investigative journalists out to probe the bad behaviour of their biggest advertisers–why rock the boat? However, between publisher and advertiser, Google functions as an anonymising bufffer. If I don’t know who my advertisers are, and they don’t know where their ads will appear, it’s hard for us to influence each other. Of course, it’s easy to think of situations (you only have a few advertisers in your area of interest, or you deliberate set out to attract and service advertisers) where the influence no longer exists. But I think the influence is much less of a problem now than before.
Not that I’m any more in love with ads. I already use Adblock and will install Greasemonkey ad nukers as soon as I hit “Publish” on this. Bloggers will have to live without my clickthrough revenue, though I’m happy to give you all the demographic information you need to help you understand your audience. I’m an 18-24 male with >$1,000,000 in disposable income. I live in the 55555 zipcode of Afghanistan and I would love to receive opt-in mail from you and selected partners at my private email address of <saddam.jong.hitler@whitehouse.gov> while I indulge in my pastimes of diamond cutting, windsurfing, and nation-building. Hope this helps you better serve me!