RSS advertising response

Lots of responses to our decision to put ads in our RSS feeds.  We truly appreciate all the feedback, positive and negative.  Some of the comments were fair and balanced and some of the comments and insinuations out there are basically incorrect or at least misleading (I'll point those out below). 

A useful and productive interchange between Phil Windley and Jenny Levine on the topic.  One note of clarification for the discussion -- in Jenny's post, she links the words "Obviously, InfoWorld sees this differently" to a quote from the AdWeek Technology Marketing story on our decision.  Just wanted to point out that those are not actually our words and InfoWorld and AdWeek are completely unrelated, though we do appreciate Jonathan Angel's article.  He's covering us and offering his own analysis.  You can get our point of view from reading comment #1 from Matt McAlister under Jenny's post.

A post from Rich Miller is mostly negative on the inclusion of ads in RSS feeds:

Maybe there's a way to do this that will align with the culture of the Blogosphere, in the way text ads have been seen as an acceptable alternative to banners. But I don't think we'll see it originate with professional marketers or magazine publishers.

We're certainly trying to align with the culture by advertising something that is relevant (an RSS newsreader), but also testing new ways to pay for things like the large-scale 10 gigabit ethernet switch tests you read about in InfoWorld.  I was responsible for managing the costs of those tests -- it wasn't cheap, and it was the kind of story that really couldn't be done with a laptop and a DSL line.  I also have to call Rich on saying we issued a "press release" in his post -- we didn't.  As I mentioned above, this was a story from Jonathan Angel about our decision to put ads in our RSS feeds.  

Calling it a "press release" also obscures what it really was -- a bottom-up, grass-roots advertising effort.  As a consumer of InfoWorld's RSS feeds and a producer of an RSS reader, Greg Reinacker contacted Matt McAlister and asked if he could advertise with us, Matt suggested our RSS feed, Greg agreed, and they worked out a deal.  Matt came to me and Chris Lin (our wonderful senior software engineer) made it work.  In the end, two people spoke and made an old-fashioned deal. To me, this is the sales and marketing version of manufactured serendipity.   No press releases, no advertising agencies:  really just a manual human version of a bidding process that you already see working successfully with Google and Overture. 

The important point is that we are still experimenting.  In addition to the feedback above, we are taking note of and actively discussing what other folks in the blogosphere are saying: 

• Dwight Shih's comments about the parsimonious nature of our RSS feeds (Dwight, we're working on that -- point well-taken!)


• James Snell's suggestions to tags ads as such, or just create a new type of element for ads (and James, I especially appreciate your entirely fair and reasonable comment on Sam Ruby's weblog: If I like the content enough, I'll gladly pay a subscription fee to access it.)


• As I referenced above, Phil Windley makes comments that I agree with.

Thanks for the feedback -- more updates to come as we work through the suggestions.