So now there’s adsense for RSS feeds (or at least an early beta of such).  It raises some interesting issues.  I hate ads so I’ll quite happily unsubscribe from any feed that has ads in it, but what about the various planets that I subscribe to?  What if one person who’s syndicated through those planets adds advertising to their RSS feeds, would I unsubscribe from the whole planet?  Possibly.  What if a few people did?  Probably.

What is a fair policy for planet administrators to take on this?  Is it okay for them to remove the ads from the feeds so as not to annoy their readers?  Should they drop feeds that contain ads?  Should they offer two feeds, one that includes the people with ads and one that doesn’t?

Personally I’d consider it poor form to put ads in your RSS feed, if you want to build a business model around displaying ads, put a summary in the RSS feed and make people go to your site and view the ads there if they actually want to read it.  Just because your RSS feed comes into my news reader doesn’t mean I’m actually interested in anything you write – there are certain people who come through planet aggregators that I wish I could have taken out of the feed but the convenience of having all the other blogs in one feed and someone else finding and adding other feeds makes it worth putting up with skipping the extraneous entries.

Someone needs to come up with a better business model than trying to pay for everything by cramming ads down the users throats or everyone will wind up resorting to ad-blocking software.  How long before ad-blocking comes as a standard part of browsers?  They already support blocking pop-up ads.

Update: Well the first unsubscription due to ads has happened.  Slashdot decided it was a good idea to put ads in their RSS feed despite the fact that the feed doesn’t include links to the articles anyway so I go to their website for anything worth reading anyway.  So just like that I’ve kicked my slashdot habbit – it’s probably for the best anyway.  Well, I must admit, I still subscribe to the feed for the Apple section because it hasn’t delivered any ads yet but I imagine it’s just a matter of time before they cram them in their as well.

While I’m updating, Ugo Cei had a few things to say about ads in RSS which is worth reading.  There definitely needs to be some effort put in soon to provide some options for this.  Planet style aggregators probably need to have an option to filter out ads, blogging tools need an option to create separate feeds with and without ads (most likely the without ads only contains a summary while the with ads feed contains the full text).  Personally I’m considering finding a way to just block the ads so they don’t display in my feed reader (I’d be happy to download them, just not display them) - I’m philosophically opposed to clicking on them anyway.