I was a bit surprised that “John Battelle” so easily dismissed the problems that syndication will cause ad-supported sites when I asked him about it for “today’s Five Questions for…” feature. I think that “Keith Robinson” shows the confusion many publishers feel about this issue in his “How RSS Affects Content Monetization” post. We seem to be at a bit of an impasse. One contingent saying “don’t clutter my feedreader with crappy ads — I read feeds to get away from the clutter” and another equally reasonable contingent saying “don’t give me notifications and summaries that force me to go to your site to read your posts — I want everything served up right in my reader”.

Since full, ad-free editorial posts in feeds seems to be a non-starter for ad-supported sites, how do we move forward to find something that everyone can be happy with?

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Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on July 11, 2005.