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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the blame on ads. The ecosystem with the best RSS support is podcasts - almost every podcast has an RSS feed, and most people consume podcasts using a podcast player, which is essentially an RSS player. But lots of podcasts have ads. I don't see why text RSS feeds couldn't include ads as well. If that motivated more sites to have fulltext RSS feeds it would be a good thing.

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Ads on a website can be personalized (which is why many RSS feeds for news sites only short the first three paragraphs and then force you to click through into their website). Ads in a podcast delivered by RSS feed are much harder to personalize since the user agent pulling the RSS feed is less identifiable than a browser. That's why podcast platforms offering personalized ads rely on their own walled garden of client apps, like Spotify.

Ever since I started using RSS, back in the Google reader days, I used it in list view and clicked on articles I was interested in. I still do this today. I run ad blockers, so I'm absolutely useless to the sites, but I want to see the article in the original format.

The simplest response, although there are several, is control. If I am on your site you have (some) control over my experience and potentially information about me & what I do. If I consume your content via a feed I can (more easily) ignore your ads and you have less information.

Well, the site owner would have 0 control over what extensions I have installed. Asking me to disable them would most definitely result in me leaving.

This is why I caveated my statements. AdBlockers, Privacy guards, and so on change the game as more people use them. That said, I've seen no stats but I wonder if that's even a majority.

It's also worth remembering that they are a relatively new phenomenon developed in response to the snooping. There was a long period where companies like Facebook had it all their own way. And this is the period in which the damage was mostly done.

I'm not sure if it's a majority, however, I certainly recommend them everywhere I can. I've been using them since before Google reader shut down, so they've certainly been around a while.

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