You know it’s time to move along when the carpetbaggers show up. Last week at the Web 2.0 conference, Yahoo’s chief operating officer, Dan Rosensweig, announced that the company’s Overture subsidiary would support advertising in RSS. The game’s over, kids, before we even get to see whether your non-geek friends could figure out how to use these syndication formats (collectively referring to the amalgamated acronym soup of RDF, RSS, and ATOM as simply “RSS”). After all, the vast majority of networked computer users have no idea what RSS is or how to use it. Hell, even most geeks don’t know (as evidenced by the hits on several of my feeds that have been deprecated for more than a year). Acceleration isn’t necessarily intelligent; it’s just faster than before, and low-end syndication formats like RSS are a perfect example of just how fast and dumb things have gotten on the net.
Yahoo’s in and Google will almost certainly follow, including contextual advertising in RSS for its AdSense product. Of course there have been other options for including ads in RSS feeds for a while, but they’re small potatoes. That Yahoo and presumably Google are getting involved makes this a very big deal indeed and enough for me to think it’s probably time to be moving along.
There’s precedent for this of course. These syndication formats were originally designed to aggregate content—a title, byline, and summary of an article—on a server from multiple sources. But, as William Gibson, so aptly wrote lo those many years ago, “the street finds its own use for things.” Content aggregation on the server never really caught on, but desktop aggregation swelled to popularity among the geeks and early adopters. Mistaking this for a market, Yahoo and Google will almost certainly kill it. Because, you see, there’s a dirty little secret about the unintended consequence of these syndication formats: we use them to avoid advertising.
RSS is mostly unspoiled when it comes to marketing and advertising, and we like it that way. You can tell that the marketeers haven’t yet arrived because the alpha geeks are still duking it out to determine the dominant format. Here’s the bottom line: If I have to wade through ads to read your content, I’m gone. And because it’s RSS, you’ll never even notice my exit until it’s too late. With few exceptions, I can find alarmingly similar content elsewhere. I haven’t missed InfoWorld or the Lockergnome feeds in the least. If either does something worthy of notice, it’s cross-linked by enough secondary and tertiary sources that I’ll rarely miss anything important. Unfortunately, the way these things work is a cycle of innovation > early adoption > refinement > despoliation > irrelevance. A not-so-virtuous circle.
Everyone’s looking for a sustainable online publishing business model, but no one has tried anything new for more than ten years. And the banner ad and its variants, no matter how finely targeted, were neither new nor innovative. We need to break the not-so-virtuous circle between refinement and despoliation with wider adoption.
So, what’s next? Maybe it’s podcasting. Give it six months and the carpetbaggers will be all over it.
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