Oh for fuck’s sake… I was going through my normal round of RSS reading this morning and noticed that a number of them suddenly started shoving ads in my face. One is from a family of blogs, so they’ve added a “brought to you by” cross promotion tag line on every article and someone else put what looks like Google ads in their articles…
Come’n bloggers… web ads did nothing but piss people off, so why clutter up an RSS feed with’m? I can sincerely promise you that nothing in any of these ads will get me to click through them. In fact, if I see a product in an RSS ad that looks interesting, I’ll go type the URL in myself so that you won’t get a click-through kick back. Just out of spite. Yes… I really do mean it.
I’m ads free – except for my book (which would make a great case study on how people don’t buy through ads!) – and I’m staying that way.
I’ve noticed this on some newspaper RSS feeds, where it’s very irksome but part of the “ad cost” of the otherwise free service.
My resentment is having the ads fill in a slot (or two) when I reduce the RSS listings per site.
It’s looking like the ads aren’t appearing on WilWheaton’s site anymore… as he’s going through a redesign, it might have just been a typo, but even so – I can see other blogs jumping on that bandwagon.
Either that or I’m so numb to it that I missed it :)