One argument that I’ve heard against Ads-in-RSS goes like this: “Ads in your RSS feed disrupts the flow of content in the agrgregator (what Dave Winer calls the river of news) and thus will drive users to other feeds where the same content is available but without the disruption.”

This view is unsupported by my observations. First, Engadget has had decent image-based ads in their RSS for more than a month and ugly ones for longer. I think if they were going to suffer a huge exodous from their feed they would have seen it by now and changed their tactics. Second, my own behavior indicates otherwise. I’m a fairly sophisticated RSS user, and while I’ve always had Gizmodo available as a much less ad-intensive [1] Engadget alternative with the essentially the same content I’ve never unsubscribed from Engadget’s ad-laden feed.

In point of fact, while I’ve been interested in Russell Beattie’s experiment with forms in RSS, I find them much more disruptive. Case in point:

I find them so much more disruptive, in fact, that I’ve considered unsubscribing from Russell’s feed. I don’t share Russell’s obsession with mobile technology nor do I share his apparent confidence in small-scale convergence as they way of the future, so only about 50% of Russell’s posts (sometimes fewer than that) are of interest to me. Those posts are highly interesting, so I won’t be unsubscribing any time soon, but I wish there was a less invasive way for Russell to include forms in his RSS feed.

Of course, I’m sure there are already services that will strip ads from RSS feeds; I doubt that web-based aggregators will routinely remove ads from feeds they republish (since their revenue is based on the fact that those authors want their feeds republished in Bloglines or Rojo) but I wonder how long it will be before client-based aggregators offer ad- or form- stripping as a standard option….

¹ Gizmodo puts ads on about 1 of every 5 posts, as opposed to Engadget’s shotgun approach of an ad per post.