Ad-versaries
I’m so tired of this battle against advertising, because it’s so misdirected. Wired News just reported on the struggle of putting advertising in RSS feeds. Now, the problem is not with advertising itself: people like ads. People need ads. Someone once said “the most valuable commodity is human attention.” Our attention is commanded by our personal and our business responsibilites. Most of the time we need advertisments to bring relevant items to our attention because we don’t have the time to do the kind of research that brings these things to the forefront naturally.
It’s not that ads in RSS are bad, it’s that the ads that are being selected and the treatment of these ads are bad. Dave Winer singled out Engadget as an example of an ad treatment that was undesirable: the advertisement was run as a panel within a particular feed item. Engadget is telling me they are willing to clutter my reading with an advertiser’s message, and that I must make the effort to read around it.
While this kind of treatment makes sure it is seen, it’s intrusive to the point where it will start to turn people away. I use RSS to quickly browse to articles that interest me. If ads begin to interfere with that, that feed is history. There’s only two rules you need for advertising: it must not interfere with reading your content, and must be relevant to your readers.
When I was at sputnik7.com, our ad partner would continually get us runs for either completely unrelated crap—the kind with loud, flashing banners—or stuff that involved streaming audio and Java… because we were a multi-media site! It made sense to them, except that it ultimately conflicted with the already-existing audio and video content we had across the site and sometimes even crashed browsers. Aside from a handful of thoughtful pairings, like Diesel, the ones we were given were terrible.
The flip-side is that I probably click on five to ten music ads a week on Pitchfork. Not because they’re ultra-effective campaigns, but because I’m a music-lover. I’m on a music site. So if I see an ad about a band that looks interesting, I’ll click it. The point is, if the ad is relevant, it will perform no matter what.
Engadget is ahead of the game by sticking to relevant advertisers, but why aren’t they simply separating the sponsored content from the editorial content by making the ads their own items? The sad reality is that intrusive ads still perform, and many ad networks won’t play fair with you—either you make the ads intrusive or you won’t get them at all. But you have to remember your target audience: if Engadget wants to hold onto the tech-savvy early-adopter community—the folks who make up the majority of RSS users right now—then they just gotta know that they might lose that audience with moves like this. A more ad-friendly mainstream audience might tolerate it better, but those people don’t even know what RSS is yet…
