After all, all the RSS ad-haters need to remember that every time a feed is queried, it consumes bandwidth, and bandwidth costs money. And full-text RSS feeds are bigger and therefore consume more costly bandwidth.

So in my not-so-humble opinion, RSS users can suck it up so that sites can afford to continue providing RSS feeds.

(BTW, if you had Japanese schoolgirl ads in your feeds Mark might change his mind…)

As they are now, the ads on the blog itself are fine because they don’t disrupt the flow of content. They are properly restrained and keep to themselves, like introverts at a party.

But if you start mixing ads *into* the content — and feeds are content — you will have invited drunken extroverts to crash the party and shout, “Look at me, my hat is a sponsored lampshade!” You wouldn’t invite jerks like that to your house. Why invite them to your blog?

You must do what you feel is right, of course. It won’t stop me from reading either way.

I think ads in RSS feeds are lame. When I’m looking for something with Google, there’s a non-zero chance that I’m looking to buy something… so AdWords are fine. It is a different story when I’m reading blogs. The ads are just noise, like those damn inserts in magazines. Just say no.

The one problem I have with my RSS feeds is that my spiffy layout for inset screen shots in posts about games doesn’t quite work. But that’s just because I’m too lazy to figure out how to do it right.