Firm eyes RSS feeds as ad vehicle
Found on CNet News on Sunday, 27 February 2005
Kanoodle, a search-advertising specialist, wants to help turn blogging into small business.
On Monday, the company is expected to introduce a self-service system that lets online publishers pair advertising with their RSS feeds. Called BrightAds RSS (after the technology format Really Simple Syndication), the service takes advantage of Kanoodle's keyword advertising system to match Web content to relevant ads. Once a publisher signs up, an advertising link will piggyback on its syndicated feed sent to third-party news readers.
New York-based Kanoodle and Moreover, based in San Francisco, have been testing RSS advertising for more than six months, and according to Pitkow, the tests have been profitable.
Now RSS finally gets flooded with ads too. At least here users can quit reading a feed if it has too much ads, unlike traditional spam. Let's hope advertisers and publishers show respect to users and mark the advertising entries (with eg "ADV:" in the subject) so people can decide whether they want to read it or not. One of the feeds I read does that, and I configured my aggregator drops those.