I recently started experimenting with text advertising on fettig.net. I want to get up to speed on web advertising, and the best way to learn is to use myself as a guinea pig. For the past week I’ve been putting text ads from the Yahoo! Publisher Network on my blog pages, which has been making me about a dollar a day – not much, but more than enough to cover my hosting expenses.
As the next step in this little experiment, I’m putting ads into my RSS feed. The idea of putting a little ads after each post in your RSS feed seems like a good one to me. The ad is nice and small, and doesn’t get in the way of your content, but it makes it possible to make money of your feed. I do have one concern, which is what will happen on sites that syndicate my feed. I don’t really want to be injecting ads into Planet Python or Planet Textdrive or any other site that aggregates my feed. So for now I’ve wrapped the RSS ad code in a PHP if statement so it will only show up in this post. This way I can see what happens on the Planets and other sites before I turn on RSS ads for all posts. So tell me: where are you reading this post? Do you see the ad? Is it annoying, neutral, or helpful?
Wel, since you asked, its annoying and I think the only feed I remember on Planet Python that has ads.
I was hoping the Planet sites would pull the shorter field instead of the full-text content:encoded, where the ad is. But apparently that’s not the case. I just added some code to sniff the user-agent and not serve the ad if it’s a Planet-powered site, which should be effective as of my next post.
I find it annoying if only because the ad was irrelevant. I use Bloglines and I got an ad for buying a laptop. Luckily, I also use Adblock, so I didn’t have to stare at it for long.
David – I’m glad you were able to block the ad with bloglines. I don’t want the ads to be annoying, and I want them to be explicitly blockable. I haven’t turned on ads in the Atom feed, so you can subscribe to http://fettig.net/weblog/feed/atom to get the same content with no ads.
Unsubscribed :-)
I see your post on my planet, which aggregates four other planets (all running Planet Planet). I see no ad, which make me happy. If I started seeing ads in a particular blog, I’d probably have to look into Planet’s facilities for feed filtering.
I see it on planetpython as of 12/13/05. Can’t say it’s annoying by itself, but heaven help us if everyone started doing it.