blackrimglasses

[From Hot Women Drive Fast Cars ~ Chris Pirillo]

I really like Chris. I consider him a friend. But I’m about to the point of unsubscribing from the RSS feed because its turned into an advertorial for car manufacturers as he’s out in Germany on the time of a large multinational. This is warranting a larger post about the ethics of advertorial content within what should be informative “personal” blogs, and how the disclosure of “sponsored” posts should be made.

So here I go: Advertorials are common in both magazines and newspapers. They are content that morphologically mimic the content they are surrounded by, save for a disclosure usually at the top or bottom of the page that indicates “paid advertisement.”

The reason I don’t think they belong in blogs is pretty simple:

1) They pollute my attention stream. I subscribe to blogs to get information. RSS has proven a good mechanism for me to filter the information I want to get, as well as ensure I retain control over the validity of that information in terms of it containing advertising. RSS feedvertising hasn’t disturbed me because I don’t think it works and thus I filter it out. But a feed that is blatant advertisements, without a method of disclosure is disturbing,

2) I think that advertorial content, if to exist within normally informative and editorial based feeds should have a label like [ADVERTISEMENT] to facilitate easy filtering. Likewise, feed readers should let you filter it.

3) If you’re going to do advertorial blogging, provide a non-ad based feed to your readers during the run.

So for now, I have just turned off Chris’ feed, but keeping it in the reader. When he returns from Germany, I’ll turn it back on.

The moral for me about this, if you have the attention of someone through implicit consent (ie, subscribing to a feed), don’t abuse it.