RSS abuse?

Todd Cochrane decided to remove an RSS feed because of an ad that appeared after every article.

… I’m serious — the stupid ad TechCrunch has after every article in the feed measures 612 pixels in height.[Source]

Meanwhile a number of companies have been in the news lately for trying to cash in on using RSS feeds to boost the commercial value of a blog.

rssHugger

rssHugger is a new website developed to help bloggers promote their blogs, and to help visitors discover new blogs that write about subjects that the readers are interested in. Through the power of the internet and viral marketing, rssHugger looks to bring blog writers and blog readers closer together. If you own a blog, you can get your own page on rssHugger for 10 years for only $20. If you make a blog post about rssHugger, you can get the already low price cut in half! Own an rss page for 10 years for only $10 with a blog post… [Source]

And in a past post we mentioned RSSExplosion and its promise to increase a blog’s RSS subscribers for a fee.

These recent developments or news makes me think of two things.

First, Clearly there is nothing wrong with using ads in feeds. But it is equally clear that there is a threshold, when above it the ads became nauseating and irritable.

Second, There seems to be lot of promises being waved about that uses RSS as the base from which they anchor their pitch. All I can say to that are two phrases: Buyer Beware and You can never cheat an honest man.

The downside of RSS abuse is of course terminal: they, the readers, just unsubscribe the abusive feed.