It's amazing how things work. On Sunday night, I was just wondering if there would be a huge outcry if someone (like say, Engadget, for example) started adding advertising to their RSS feed.

Then Monday, it happened. Engadget has a small advertisement at the bottom of every feed item.

I'm not sure how I feel about it. Their ad is unobtrusive, but that doesn't mean it'll stay that way. I don't necessarily mean engadget. Once advertisers get a hold of this, I'm sure we'll see services, such as adsense, that allow these types of ads to be served, where everyone can easily add them to their own feeds.

The question will be what permutations will we see? Remember the first ads on web pages? They were the same way - unobtrusive, out of the way, ads. Now, we have tools built-in to the browsers to combat the aggressive nature ads have taken on. Will that make it's way into RSS? Will I download a feed, read an item, and have what? A pop up? A feed automatically added to your aggregator? There are quite a few aggregators that use IE as the rendering engine - is it far behind that someone takes advantage of that fact?

Now, the next question. Will they be effective? I guess the "pioneers" of RSS ads will have to be the judge of that. Personally, even the "newness" of the engadget ads couldn't entice me to click on the ad. On the other hand, I know it was for Bose, so I guess it had some effectiveness.

Heh. Maybe I should start a syndication ad service, where advertisers can buy ads, and are matched up with users who are willing to add the ad to their syndication feed. Something along the lines of BlogAds, but for syndication.