re: Advertising/subscription feeds?

[Joe Hourcle <oneiros@dcr.net>]

Excuse the intrusion -- I'm new on this list, and this thread looked to be
stale, but not really discussed to any sort of completion, so I thought
I'd inject some useless comments.


> From:  "wkearney99" <wkearney99@h...>
> Date:  Tue Oct 23, 2001  3:17 pm
> Subject:  Advertising/subscription feeds?
>
> Given the recent news of Salon isolating some content to
> subscriptions, MetaFilter taking ads and now SlashDot dangling the
> possibility of pay-to-exclude functionality (also available in Yahoo
> Groups).
>
> What does this bode of syndicated feeds?  How long before the
> schlockmeisters start tacking advertising into feeds?
>
> How prepared are the various client and aggregators for possible login
> requirements of subscribed feeds?
>
> This leads to the question about how to handle forwarding or routing
> of content derived from subscribed feeds.
>
> Thoughts?

I think it's really an issue of how you present it to the folks that are
syndicating their content.  The benefits of syndication are that you
control what information you're putting out there.  You can  give 'teaser'
text if you wish, to draw people in.  What they have to go through to get
the whole article is an entirely different matter.  [put up with banner
ads, have to pay subscription fees, etc].

In my opinion [bound to be wrong, as always], the syndicator has
absolutely nothing to lose, save for banner ad revenue for their main
page.  They gain, however, in the reduced bandwidth, due to their main
page not being presented.  They also gain as there are other ways for
people out there to learn about their site.  [more important for the
smaller sites, less important for the larger ones].

They also gain in that they control what the links are given out to their
page.  [We all know the issue with switching 'www' to 'archives' at
nytimes.com]  Folks who write scraping programs can manipulate the links
to get folks to enter through other means than intended, such as bypassing
the CGI which fark.com uses to count who's following their links.

Although sites such as Obscure Store and Robot Wisdom don't have much to
gain from syndication, as it would essentially mean that no one would
visit their site, and just bypass it entirely, sites like Salon and
Slashdot could force all information about the article to first go to
their local page on the article.  [In the case of Slashdot, you'd then
have to continue on to the main article, but they've already gotten your
imprint for banner-ad selling purposes, or, for those paying them,
banner-ad-less services]

Now, it does mean that the various sites have to keep their articles
interesting enough for people to actually look at them, and not have a
whole bunch of crap that people would have gone to their front page, and
think 'this sucks' and move on, rather than just using the name that
they've made for themselves in the past drive people going to their site
that they've now tiled with banners.

Everything has it's pros and cons.  No matter how you present something,
people are going to find fault with it.  Yes, there might be people out
there who try to claim ownership of someone else's content...they could
have done that with scraping.  Yes, there's that whole 'deep linking'
issue, but if you don't want people off site linking straight to that
article, you don't have you syndicate that particular one.

-----
Joe Hourcle