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RSS Feeds With Ads -- Say When, When It's Too Much..
Jenny Levine of the Shifted Librarian has a great summary of Debra Overbey's reaction to abebooks.com's adds put into RSS feeds by Moreover. Out of the 59 headlines, 30 were ads for Abebooks on the day Overbey wrote to Moreover to tell them that while she didn't mind some ads, this was entirely too much. Also, on another feed Overbey subscribed to (the Moreover Book Review feed), there were 44 ads for Simplyaudiobooks out of 78 headlines.
Overbey contacted Abebooks who was very responsive, but Moreover completely ignored her two notes to them explaining that the feeds were overrun with ads. Overbey ended up dropping the two feeds from Moreover, because they weren't responsive, and the value of the content became so reduced it wasn't worth it.
Jenny Levine points out:
- consider this a warning to companies thinking of inserting ads into their feeds. Most people won't take the time to provide the kind of feedback Debra did, so value it when they do. And keep the number of ads down or else we'll unsubscribe. That is, after all, the beauty of RSS.
Making conversation with your business' community of interest is key, and Moreover needs to understand that if they don't, they'll lose that community to other businesses that do those conversations better.
As Hugh McCloud says, "Smarter conversations equals better products. It’s so frickin’ obvious."
Posted by Mary Hodder at 08:21 AM on June 28, 2004