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February 28, 2005
RSS feeds the next frontier
Silicon.com writes of a new book which claims spam via email is on the way out, and the next big thing is RSS.
The gist seems to be that it is getting harder to make money from spam, fewer click-throughs and there is a figure touted saying that only a third of email sent is even opened. It then goes on to say that RSS feeds are the next way to go.
Now I am only going by that article, I haven't read the book. But as it stands with the article, I am not sure I see how spammers are going to switch to RSS with any success at all. Don't get me wrong, I think RSS is great and we use it here at Spamblogging.
But my issue is that I am not immediately seeing how spammers are going to use it.
Perhaps there is an issue of this article confusing just "advertising" with spam. Spam is undesired advertising (which happens to usually be scams, but that is a separate issue) which is sent to an email address. The end-user has little to no ability to stop it, only to filter it. RSS on the other hand is entirely up to the end-user. It is impossible to be forced into reading an RSS feed in the way that you can be sent an email without warning. You have to manually setup your reader to get an RSS feed.
That said, if you are actively reading an RSS feed, the people publishing that can put ads in there - BoingBoing uses it or something like it.
But there is a massive difference between regular advertising like that, and spam. It is an important distinction and if you ever feel that you aren't up for that regular advertising, you always have the option to not use the service which is sending the ads to you.
Email spam doesn't give you that option - they forcibly sent the ad to you without your request.
While I very much hate spam, it bothers me even more to see people getting the terms and definitions wrong and getting bothered by advertising in general. While I am not thrilled about ads, we have them here on Spamblogging, and they are a necessary evil since pretty much everything has a cost and ads are one way to try to recover those costs.
Posted by Eric at February 28, 2005 09:21 AM
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Good eye and excellent point - thanks for commenting on that. It does say "web marketers", which should be considered distinctly different than just spammers.
I should also note that there are many that think ads in RSS are a very bad idea and that they don't belong there. I do see the reason people would put ads into RSS, to try to make money off of those who might not come to the site as often any more, and RSS does put some load on the server.
But part of the whole point of RSS is to have a stripped down interface to a site. As you say, there are certainly companies which can make good use of it, and then there are outlets which would probably have less of a (goood) reason to use it other than just hopes at another revenue stream.
This post by Matt Haughey immediately comes to mind as raising some good points.
Posted by: Eric at February 28, 2005 11:13 AM
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Well, the article doesn't say anything at all about spamming; it says that "web marketers" may turn from e-mail to RSS. Depending on how you define your terms, it may be the case that all spammers are web marketers; but it's not the case that all web marketers are spammers. Their point may be that "legitimate" web marketers (however they think that term ought to be applied) are likely to get by spam filters and to have their messages go unread when customers are inundated with spam anyway, and so are more likely to move their means of communication to RSS feeds that users can voluntarily subscribe to (and unsubscribe from). Of course, some websites that specialize in advertising of employment or services that users have a significant incentive to seek out--e.g. Craiglist--already offer RSS feeds along these lines.
That's my charitable guess at an interpretation, anyway.
Posted by: Rad Geek at February 28, 2005 10:29 AM