Finishing up a four-part series on data bite revenue models, today, we touch on the touchy topic of advertising.

Will we accept it? Hatred of advertising and the attitude that the internet is free (of cost) are deeply entrenched in net culture. Even non-intrusive advertising is despised by many. Intrusive advertising, such as spam and popup ads, are utterly abhorred. A number of factors will affect how well data bite advertising is accepted.

Timing: I personally have a hard time imagining that advertisements in feeds will be easily accepted by those who are currently using data bite formats. On the other hand, if it's there when everyone else arrives on the scene, they'll never know how good life used to be, and they'll just accept it. The sooner advertising hits the feeds, the more accepted it will ultimately be.

Disruptiveness: Feeds in which data bite advertising follows the route of spam and popup ads will face an uphill battle for readership. Certainly few people who subscribe directly to the feeds will be willing to put up with a signal to noise ratio as low as what we see in email today, and with advertising which disrupts the reading experience like popups. However, unless aggregators develop technology to weed out such feeds, they are likely to become the next victims of unscrupulous advertising on the net. Simply reviewing feeds before including them in an index will not be enough because there is no guarantee that a feed will not start off clean and have advertising added later.

Placement: Will ads show up as their own items/entries (depending on which format you're using), or will they appear within items that contain content that the reader wants? I think we'll start off seeing more ads in their own items, but eventually, as the tools develop the ability to filter the ads out, the ads will migrate into the content. Some end-users will drop feeds as this happens, but if they're not too disruptive, they'll probably be accepted by readers. Republishers on the other hand are unlikely to continue to republish feeds with much advertising unless they are being paid for their republishing service. For example, sites that display a newsfeed in a sidebar to augment their content are likely to go in search of cleaner feeds.

It's sad to think that we'll be needing spam filters for our data bite readers, but it seems inevitable. The good news is that the reader is in control. They can boycott spam-filled feeds much more easily than we can filter out spam email. And if they want to subscribe to spammed feeds and use a filter, they can choose to do that too.

As a publisher of data bite feeds and tools for working with them, I certainly hope that the revenue model will be strong. I believe that RSS, Atom, Info Bite, and other such formats have the power to deliver immense value to web sites and net surfers. May we find mutually beneficial and acceptable ways to deliver and profit from the value we create.