Still on the topic of business models for RSS Aggregators, Charles Coxhead asked a very interesting question in the comments to my post entitled Contextual Adverts in Bloglines in 2005. Charles asked:
"Do you think there will be any issues for Bloglines in using others content for the purposes of building context for advertising, ie. is that contrary to licenses which state that the content can not be used for commercial purposes?"
I'd like to throw that question out to my readers. What do you think?
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I'm not well-versed in the creative commons license but as a blogger I have an opinion:
As a blogger whose content may drive the "Adsense on Steroids" revenue that Bloglines plans on receiving, I need to be considered a very important part of that equation. Here are the pieces of the puzzle: (1) Bloglines shares that revenue with bloggers whose content he's profiting from, (2) Bloglines solicits input from the blogging community and listens very carefully regarding the way any ads appear on Bloglines and (3) or they don't have ads.
Posted by: Janet Tokerud | December 23, 2004 8:10 AM
At the risk of being contrary, I really don't see a difference between Bloglines making money selling ads driven by blog content, and Google doing the same thing with AdWords.
I use Bloglines to death, and like it a lot better than the various standalone clients I've used. But it's pretty obvious given the amount of traffic that they're running that somewhere, somehow they're going to have to generate some revenue.
Bloglines does offer a "payback" to blogs even today, and that's traffic, which the site owner can either monetize or not as they see fit.
I think if they want to add contextual advertising with a minimum of fuss, they need to do two things -- offer a paid version of the service to readers who don't want to see the ads (keeping it competitive with NetNewsWire, FeedDemon, etc.), and offer site owners a chance to opt-out (just as Google does, with robots.txt), and not be used as contextual ad fodder, but not receive the traffic, either.
If a Bloglines user tried to subscribe to an "opted-out" site's feed, they'd get a "so sorry" page explaining why. If enough major sites did this, Bloglines user share (and potential ad revenue) would decline, and something else would give. My guess is that this wouldn't happen.
Another alternative might be "paid exclusion" -- let site owners that =are= making a lot of money from the traffic pay a small fee to have their feed appear without ads.
In any event, it'll be interesting to see how it all goes down...
Posted by: Chuck Lawson | December 24, 2004 8:45 AM
Personally I don't see the "opt out" bit being viable - just as Google doesn't have an opt-out clause (with the exception of some religious websites!), it would be very detrimental to Bloglines' reputation to not cover as many blogs as possible.
One thing to note about Bloglines is that they still use *frames* in their design. So they may well put their adverts in a separate frame - which means it would not be 'mixed in' with peoples blog content. So they can still contextualise the ads according to the content, but because the adverts are kept in a seperate frame it means they have a defence to the licensing issues.
Does this sound likely?
Posted by: Richard MacManus | December 24, 2004 9:42 AM
I don't think opting-out would be very viable either; perhaps even moreso for the sites themselves than for Bloglines (I can't see BoingBoing giving up all that traffic, for instance)
But it would be an answer for those who are adamant about keeping their content from driving ads, with a similar impact to disallowing GoogleBot in robots.txt (no contextual ads = no traffic from that source.)
Posted by: Chuck Lawson | December 24, 2004 11:02 AM
Oops -- to answer your question about frames... I'm really not sure how Bloglines is going to do ads without cluttering up that interface (it's pretty cluttered now, frankly.)
I think from a usability standpoint, adding more to the left frame would be terrible. The best place from my viewpoint would be to do it at the top or bottom of the right page, but I'm sure you're right that IP questions may drive the decision.
I guess I'm still not sure I really buy that this is a real issue for most RSS content providers -- I remember (back before the days of aggregators) putting up RSS feeds and promoting them on sites like Syndic8 in hopes that people =would= add them to their sites, to add value to whatever they were trying to sell. The tradeoff (then as now) would be that you got traffic (and/or PageRank) back in return.
To me, this is kind of implicit in publishing an RSS feed; I =want= people to repurpose it, and I assume that one of the reasons most sites that might repurpose it exist is to make a profit, directly or indirectly. But I guess I might feel different if the first feed I published came with a blogging package, right along with instructions for how to set up my Creative Commons license.
Posted by: Chuck Lawson | December 24, 2004 11:12 AM
Good thoughts Chuck. Also it may well be that Bloglines gets weblog owners to sign up for their advertising service - with the sweetener of a small percentage to the blogger (a la Google Ads). That would certainly get around the licencing issue and I'm sure there would be huge demand for it from bloggers, again much like GoogleAds. In that case then, there would only be ads within Bloglines for those feeds that have given their permission. Much like Janet suggested.
This is all just idle speculation :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | December 24, 2004 12:58 PM