The internet has been flooded for the past few days with news and debates concerning advertising in RSS feeds, especially in consequence to Google testing AdSense ads in RSS feeds.

Especially Dave Winer has stood up against RSS advertising, asking publishers to reconsider:

“Advertising in RSS is just starting now, for all practical purposes. If we wanted to, as an industry, reject the idea, we could, by asking the people who create the software to add a feature that strips out all ads. Make it default to on. Then, that would force the advertisers, if they want to speak to us, to do so respectfully, by our choice. Create feeds of commercial information that we might be interested in, and if we are, we’ll subscribe. If not, we won’t.”

With all due respect to Dave, I certainly cannot agree with him, neither as a marketer, publisher or RSS end-user.

a] The Marketer Perspective
RSS is a content delivery channel, and us marketers have the tendancy to use every such channel to do what we are doing: market. As a marketer I can understand those not wanting to be marketed at any more, but no marketer can overlook the marketing perspective of RSS advertising. It’s targeted, it can be highly relevant and it reaches forward-thinking individuals that have actually opted-in to hear from a specific publisher.

As a marketer I do not want to abuse that trust, but build on it and provide subscribers with relevant advertising, which completes and adds to the reading experience, not take away from it.

b] The Publisher Perspective
Publishers are not in the content business exclusively to provide a service to the “community”, but in order to generate revenues.

The publishing business is more and more becoming a win-win-win situation for all parties involved. End-users want free content, which can, on the long-term, only be provided if there is some compensation involved for the publisher. RSS advertising makes this possible, helping publishers generate additional revenues and thus also provide better and more high-quality and high-frequency content.

Let us not forget that creating and providing content costs money and time, and only publishers that make money from this will survive on the long-term.

c] The End-User Perspective
First, as an end-user I want to receive high-quality free content (to a certain extent, of course), which is only possible if the publisher makes enough money to cover the editorial and publishing expenses for producing such high quality content, and is of course rewarded for his great work with greater profitability.

And second, again as an end-user, I want to have as much content as possible available via RSS feeds.

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