As mentioned before here, Jason Calacanis has a rather different model for business blogging than we do at The Big Blog Company. Probably the main reason we see things differently to Jason is that we have radically different views on the efficacy of advertising. Jason's view, on the face of it, is the same as ours when he says:

I’m down with the whole disruptive advertising is dead thing. I hate commercials, and I fast forward through them on my Tivo too.

Which is exactly our view too. But the next remark in Jason's article is:

However, our strategy of having one great big advertisement per blog is really working for advertisers.

In other words: "I hate advertising! Advertising sucks! Now here is a message from our advertiser". Riiiight.

However the purpose of this article is not to bash Jason Calacanis, to whom I really do wish every success, but rather to say why we will never, ever, ever recommend to a client of ours that they stick advertisements in their RSS feeds. To paraphrase Jason, interruptive advertising is dead. It is worse than dead, actually, it is of negative value as it damages the appeal of your brand. Not only do I not want to listen to a 'message from our advertiser' when you decide I should listen to one, I will actively take measures to ensure I do not. It is called the 'back' button. Ciao babe, the customer has escaped. Elvis has left the building.

Sorry but advertisements do not provide 'amazing value' to the person reading them or useful information to me unless I actually want to see them. Given that the very raison d' être of RSS syndication is to streamline and aggregate lots of content to prevent information overload, adding something that is noise, not signal, to an RSS feed is tantamount to telling the person who has the feed "Sorry, but we are not going to allow you any say in how you access our information". If I can just about (sometimes) tolerate a banner advert by just ignoring it, I cannot ignore an advert forced into a medium designed to deliver only what I want. No way.

I could write out my reply to such a notion of interfereing with what I want to do but a well know gesture would convey my feeling on that very succinctly. Rule One of PR and marketing: do not piss off the customer... and by shoving something under my nose without so much as a 'by your leave', you are indeed pissing me off and it is not like there is any shortage of alternative places for me to take my eyeballs where folks are not annoying me.

It is extremely easy to add an RSS feed to an aggregator. It is just as easy to remove one as well.

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