RSS: Show Me the Money
Found on Wired on Wednesday, 08 December 2004
Lately there has been a lot of discussion on the net about how to make money off RSS, which, depending on whom you ask, stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, but which many publishers and bloggers hope will turn into a Really Sweet (revenue) Stream.
Like e-mail alerts, RSS is highly targeted, because it serves headlines only to people who have signed up for them. (In this sense, it's more "pull" than "push.") The difference is that RSS can deliver up-to-the-second content. Not only that, but from the perspective of publishers, it could end up a pretty elegant solution to spam, since antispam filters often make it difficult for publishers to reach readers via e-mail.
As long as advertisments are marked a such, I'm ok with it (although ad-free RSS would be nicer of course). It then would be just a line more to my aggregator to drop all ads. At least you can drop the feed if it gets too spammy, unlike email spam. Those who want ads can read them, the rest can easily ignore them.