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Comment by nathcd | Hacker News Reader

I see this argument pretty regularly, but I don't understand it. Of course you can run ads in RSS feeds; you can put whatever you want in an RSS feed.

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Ads in Internet are the whole ecosystem, they are served based on info you provide in cookies, browser fingerprint and some javascript magic. There is non of that in RSS reader as it is separate from your daily browsing.

The ads I hear on podcasts and radio shows and read in newsletters might beg to differ.

adds in RSS offer much less tracking, spying, etc... of course they are still ads, but that's not the same animal at all.

So - putting my Dr. Evil hat on - what about if on your homepage the link to the rss feed has a unique identifier, the same way the alert emails people send out tend to have a unique identifier in every url so you can track what email was successful for which user.

It doesn't help with auto discovering rss tools, but it does handle the person who right clicks and copies the url of the feed to put in their feed reader.

I'm not contending that dumb ads are the same as ads on the web. I'm saying that the killing off of RSS feeds is not due to lack of ability to advertise.

If it were simply about only showing "smart ads", Reuters could just continue to publish headlines and links without content in their RSS feeds, but they're not.

Entirely depends on what you post in the feed. Only a link to an ad driven website? Text directly from the advertisement company?

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