How long will RSS be ad-free?

You bleeding edge types know about RSS - it's the way you can grab headlines from your fave site and read them via your RSS reader - rather than going to each individual site. Cool huh? We thought so too, and feed since 2000.

Even better, you can grab headlines from your fave site and serve them on your blog. It is certainly not just for geeks anymore.

This won't be virgin ad-territory for long though, not now that the US-based Rss-ads.com has appeared. It's even rumored that Lockergnome and Paidcontent.org (who would have guessed it) ads have already begun, if ever so slowly, testing this ad-virgin territory.

Rssads.com explain their idea in their FAQ - "...We started RSSAds because we use RSS and frankly it's annoying that sites don't provide the full article text within their RSS feed.

Although some users are happy with clicking through to the full-text article (and having a banner ad served), we feel it's more convenient and quicker for users to read entire articles within an aggregator. This service is the solution to that problem." - forgetting for a moment some banner-less sites have other valid reasons for not feeding their content out like that, copyrighted photographs might be one, for example.

Opinions will naturally differ about the future success or failure of RSS - and advertising in it. On the one hand Lockergnome makes the valid point that RSS feeds are unspammable.

But what if the RSS creator decides to sell ad-space in their feed?

While it's not SPAM, it's still an ad you didn't expect to get when you signed up for "headlines from X site via RSS", now is it? (btw, LG has a good FAQ on RSS.)

Adverblog reminds us that after all, there are still only 24 hours in a day, which is probably why so many people still haven't bothered installing a feed-reader.

One might predict that sites that sell their feedspace, will lose their RSS subscribers right quick, and probably face too. The beauty of RSS is that the users are in complete control.

Don't worry kids, we won't be stuffing ads in our feed. I'd still love to know what y'all think about ads in feeds - brilliant or bomb?