Monetizing your (remaining) RSS subscribers

Both pb and Jim Kloss drew their line in the sand today: put ads in your feed, they’ll unsubscribe. Jim’s post in particular is worth reading, on taking and accepting personal responsibility for what the world is like. I get the feeling Jim’s struggling with how to live your life as example to others, rather than preaching to them about how they ought to live their life, when it seems like nobody even realizes you are trying to set an example. Or maybe that’s me: he and I think so much alike, I sometimes get things completely wrong when we diverge a bit.

In any case, I can’t claim a great moral stand on ads in feeds: thanks to an adequate HOSTS file, pagead2.googlesyndication.com is just one of hundreds of domains that get routed to 127.0.0.1 and puzzle my local copy of Apache without much affecting what I see. The ads I do see, like Arve’s handwritten “ads” for things like buying Opera, or signing up with DreamHost through his affiliate link, or the various Marqui shills attempts to do the very minimum necessary to get their check, amuse me the way all experiments with blogging do. I’d like to get up in arms about polluting something I care deeply about, but, meh, I hardly remember what those AdSense ads looked like. I do think, though, that the people who farm Google searchers for money by only showing ads in their old archives, where most of the viewers are people searching for bizarre terms that they are a horrible result for, have a much better idea than trying to show ads to the people who subscribe to an RSS feed because they want to know what you say. Do what you feel you have to, but know that if what you have to do is post nothing but pictures of mutilated Barbie dolls, or stick in generic ads without even knowing what they are for, I’ll do what I have to do, and leave you, just like Jim and pb.

5 Comments

Comment by Mark #
2005-02-23 05:16:48

Instead of 127.0.0.1, you should direct them to 0.0.0.0. Google for 127.0.0.1 0.0.0.0 hosts file for more information.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2005-02-23 20:52:55