Over the past few weeks, I have read where companies are starting to use advertisements in RSS feeds. Some are claiming this will doom RSS as it has hurt email. Others claim that they have to recoup their costs somehow and that advertisements are the only way they will be able to do that with RSS.

There is good news and there is good news. Advertisers may find a market in RSS as there are hundreds of thousands of feeds that are being served daily. That is quite a reach. The other good news, it will not hurt RSS as it has with email. RSS is an anonymous subscription services. Anyone who knows your email address can send you all kinds of junk. Since RSS is anonymous, if people are tired of seeing the ads on a feed, they will simply drop it from their list. The server will know nothing and can do nothing.

With that in mind, advertisers and those publishing the RSS feeds, will have to think very carefully about how they handle the advertisements as not to abuse people. A feed could have 20,000 subscribers, but if they put out too many or the wrong type of advertisements, they could drop to zero subscriptions overnight.

This will probably keep a lot of the RSS feeds either free of advertisements or the promotions will be subtle and not your typical banner advertisement.

RSS is here to stay and the surface has hardly been scratched yet!