Feb 16
Advertising in Action: Getting past the filters
Even though I work in an advertising agency, personally I do everything I can to keep unwanted advertising out of my life. I have Adblock Plus for Firefox, I subscribe to the National Do Not Call registry, and I filter out as much unwanted junk mail as I can. Because of this, I have only seen a handful of the ads we have created at work out in the wild.
Because of this, I was quite surprised to see one of our ads for the March for Babies, a non-profit affiliated with the March of Dimes that was previously called WalkAmerica, show up in multiple Google Reader feeds today. I forgot that as part of our campaign we had decided to host RSS feed ads through Pheedo, meaning all of my traditional ad-blocking techniques would not filter out this message. This made me realize just how powerful RSS feed ads can really be; they are targeted to a specific audience, can be served in many banner sizes, and will reach people who generally block those types of ads. I’m sure there are RSS readers that block these ads, but Google Reader, as one of the most popular available, does not.
I guess more than anything I am happy to see one of our non-profits being hosted successfully through Pheedo and reaching a large, captive audience. I am glad I haven’t taken steps to completely cut advertising out of my personal life, as I wouldn’t have been able to see the results of what I work so hard on while on the job!
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February 16th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
So you say that RSS readers such as Google Reader are immune or less-prone to ad-blockers such as Adblock Plus– why is that? Isn’t it subject to the same filtering that any other webpage would be held to? Why is it different now, and do you think it’ll last that way for long?
February 17th, 2008 at 9:25 am
Yes, Google Reader gets past Adblock and other filters. For what reason I’m not exactly sure. I have 2 guesses though.
1) The ad serving networks have not been included in Adblock’s filters since they aren’t serving ads directly to web pages, just to RSS feeds. This one would be easy to test, since I believe you can add in your own filters to Adblock, I’ve just never tried it.
2) The way Google Reader serves its content may be different. The banner ad may be served directly with the content, meaning there is no way to sort it out between regular content and ads. I am not sure if this is really an option or not since I am limited in my tech knowledge, but I could definitely see this is being another reason ads are not blocked.
My guess is that Adblock probably won’t focus on filtering out RSS feeds since that is not really the medium it normally works with. It may also be hard to put together a general “block all ads in RSS feeds,” since different RSS readers will work differently. There is a good chance that there is already an ad-blocking firefox plugin for Google Reader since it is so popular. It may be a Greasemonkey script or something, but I’ll bet it is out there. I’m sure it’s not impossible to figure out what content is made up of advertisements.