Cookies in Feed Readers

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Cookies in Feed Readers

We have to get cookies in feed readers. Why? Because we've got to be able to intelligently serve ads in feeds. And it will also allow publishers/bloggers to see much more about their audiences than they can now.

Jeff Jarvis and I talked about this yesterday.

And today Chevsky said the same thing in a comment to my last post.

I agree with both of them.

Does anyone know of any feed readers that support cookies right now?

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Posted June 4, 2004 in Venture Capital and Technology

Comments

Putting cookies in feedreaders is one thing. Who has access to reading them and how do you make that secure is quite another question.

Cookies are only accessible from the domain that they are published from. (right?) So, what use would a cookie be in a newsreader?

I understand you are all hyped up on the potential of advertising in newsreaders, (and I don't disagree with the potential or the need) but why can't it be as simple as the publisher of the weblog, putting an ad in a post?

or the newsreader company placing an ad in the newsreader?

K.I.S.S.

Posted by: Peter Caputae | Jun 4, 2004 4:35:47 PM

The problem is not the technology.

The problem is that the people that are needed to sell the concept: advertising on weblogs, do not exist. Amd that the buy side of the equation is not efficient.

Posted by: Peter Caputae | Jun 4, 2004 4:38:58 PM

As far as tracking the readership of the ads you've served up, you can easily ad "web bugs" to feeds today, no cookies required. Web bugs are simply single-pixel, clear .gifs that call back to the server with an HTTP GET. For each add you serve up, you include a unique

Now, even if feed readers supported cookies, most people still wouldn't be using any sort of authentication. So you wouldn't get personalized ads. However, you could do things like scroll through a set of ads to make sure your reader sees all the ads you have available, but that's not much better than just serving content-based ads up and/or scrolling through a set of ads.

Just some thoughts. Summary is that I think web bugs are sufficient (if a bit nefarious) for advertising in feeds. But I'm no Internet advertising expert.

Posted by: John Beatty | Jun 4, 2004 4:45:11 PM

I think you might find this interesting...from Tim Bray's blog..

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/05/25/Subscribers

Posted by: Chevsky | Jun 4, 2004 6:53:25 PM

Maybe this will work...

RSS tracking discussion

Posted by: Chevsky | Jun 4, 2004 6:54:15 PM

Cookies are one way to approach this, but dynamically generated feeds (user inputs data once via the web, gets customized feed content thereafter) seem just as reasonable for "intelligently serving ads."

Actually seems a bit more reasonable to me, since dynamic feeds don't require the developers of every widely used RSS reader out there to see your point, agree, and start supporting cookies. T

Posted by: Whitney McNamara | Jun 4, 2004 10:12:10 PM

The market for ads in feeds is young. The first step in the process is to get advertisers willing to test. The second challenge is to find publishers like yourself who are excited about the revenue potential. Once you get over those two hurdles sophisticated tracking will follow the money. We're working on this problem. More to come...

Posted by: Bill Flitter | Jun 4, 2004 11:35:15 PM

Posted by: Bill Flitter | Jun 4, 2004 11:41:06 PM

I don't get it.

That's like saying that there should be cookies in e-mail.

RSS is Real Simple for a reason.

Next everyone will be clamoring for the ability to add "style" (read presentation markup, tracking .gif files, etc. etc.) to their feeds because they don't like the native text-ness of the format.

We all know what that got us in e-mail...

I have to agree with an earlier poster. Why can't it just be as simple as inserting ads into the feeds themselves?

Posted by: Scott Partee | Jun 5, 2004 8:13:45 AM

Hehe... it's the same old "we tell, you listen" thinking that messed the Net up in the first place, and that will also cause harm to RSS as it tries to use advertising or cookies for its own gain.

I don't understand what's so difficult with this: if I want something from you, I will come to you. Period. If you try to track me, I will find ways to remove my tracks.

RSS is brilliant and has awesome potential in many ways, but if the same old wheezers (sp?) have their say again, RSS will be DOA - in more than one way.

It's time you guys realised that dialogue is more productive than tracking, but this means that you'd have to do a U-turn with your business philosophy. In an age where greed is all that counts, it's unlikely that this will happen soon, though. As a result you will have to resort to increasingly desperate measures to make money. Won't get you far though, because the users aren't as stupid as you'd like them to be.

Posted by: Helmar | Jun 5, 2004 9:20:31 PM

There are any number of ways to obtain better user information from newsfeeds. There are also several different ways to include information like advertising. Cookies aren't necessarily the only way to accomplish it and one might argue they're a bad idea for all of the same reasons they're terrible for browsers.

But for those hell bent on using cookies and the browser-like experience then, well, stick with it. Make the feed a lead-in to the richer content on the website. That way you'll not only know that readers have come looking (using a feed-specific URL) but you'll also know exactly which item drew them to the landing page. That is, instied of just using http://example.com/blog/item6.html to lead to the HTML page use something like http://example.com/blog/rss-item6.html and setup some clever mod_rewrite URL handling to match it up with the proper HTML page. You could, concievably, alter the URLs inside each and every feed as it's retrieved. But this might be a lot of new server-side processing, not to mention the users will undoubtedly get wise to be so precisely tracked. You'll only know when they won't come back.

Insult the reader's sensibilities at your peril, they've never been as dumb as many promoters assume. What's been missing up to now has been a bidirectional relationship. There's never been an effective way for consumers to directly interact with the producers. This is changing and the consumers are taking note AND sharing their experiences with others. The producer that thinks they can coninue to run roughshod over the consumers is, perhaps, in for a rude surprise.

Posted by: Bill Kearney | Jun 7, 2004 1:56:24 PM

...we've got to be able to intelligently serve ads in feeds.

No, we don't. I like getting headlines without an 800x60 banner flashing in my face, TYVM.

Does anyone know of any feed readers that support cookies right now?

No, and thank goodness they don't.

Why is it so important to find advertising space anyplace where one can slap two bits together? Is nothing sacred anymore?

Also: RSS readers are a miniscule portion of the mainstream Internet community. Is this scheme really worth it for such a small market?

Posted by: Andrew Mike | Jun 18, 2004 1:34:01 AM

A VC

Musings of a VC in NYC