Will (How will) spam kill RSS advertising?

October 28, 2004

Chris Richardson, contributing writer for Webpronews asks if RSS is in danger of becoming a spam target?

As long as we have unscrupulous people trying to make a quick buck, we will have some form of spam. To be clear, spam is not paid advertisements in feeds. We must recognize that publishers need to create revenue in order to continue providing free content. Spam is sent indiscriminately, randomly or haphazardly without a plan or consideration for the consumer.

Richardson points out how to cheat the system.

1. Someone who has realized that placing popular terms in their news posts will get them picked up by thousands of RSS subscribers.
2. It's easy to imagine a very malicious feed that would just always make its entries appear 'new' - change them subtly, report that they were just written, or whatever - so that its items would always show up in my aggregator.
3. Pop-up ads could be a successful form of RSS spam because it would be difficult to determine which feed produced the advertisement.

Problems one and two are easy to solve - unsubscribe from the feed. It's that simple. Publishers need to recognize the shift in power. The consumer controls their RSS environment and they will vote with their mouse. Put irrelevant ads in your feeds or trick your consumers, you will not have many subscribers left.

Problem three poses more of a concern. I hope the community of publishers, advertisers and aggregators agree that it is NOT ok to put pop-ups in feeds. For pop-ups to work in feeds, you need a feed reader that supports javascript. Most readers don't execute javascript. And not all are browser-based, so what would pop up? You can't pop a browser window if you aren't in the browser. And you'd only have trouble finding the offending feed if you were viewing multiple feeds at the same time in the same window.

Pheedo is advocating for an RSS ad environment that respects the preferences of the user and advertisements that enhance the content - not annoy consumers.

So what will it take to kill spam and pop-ups in feeds before it ruins RSS? The answer is - You, the bloging and RSS community. So what can you do? Blog it. Let publishers know that it is NOT ok to decieve or even include pop-ups in feeds.

Spam desimated email. Let's not repeat it with RSS.

Posted by Bill Flitter on October 28, 2004 8:01 PM
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