I don’t like advertisements in my RSS feeds. I just don’t. It’s not that I begrudge the authors the ability to monetize their content; that’s their choice, and I can certainly understand the need to pay for hosting and bandwidth costs. The day might even come one day when I am faced with the same issues here on this site. Even so, I don’t like ads in the feeds. After all, if it’s a good site, I am very likely to visit the site anyway, even with full feeds, so that I can comment, view others’ comments, or see related posts.
So, when ads started showing up in my RSS feeds from a variety of sources, I looked for a way to kill them. I came across this article (at least, I believe it was this one—I’m not entirely sure) that suggested the use of userContent.css to block ads in NetNewsWire. It works like a champ!
Basically, you have to edit the NetNewsWire stylesheet to include a reference to your ad-blocking code, like this:
@import url(../userContent.css);
Then put the userContent.css file of your choice (apparently there are many; I think I pulled down one of the files linked to in that article) in the ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Stylesheets folder, restart NNW, and away you go! No more pesky ads in the RSS feeds.
In addition to ads, the “FeedFlare†functionality offered by FeedBurner irks me as well. If I want to digg it, bookmark it with del.icio.us, or whatever, I’ll do that—I don’t need links in the content of the feed to help me. I suppose that functionality is useful to some readers, and probably helps increase readership and visibility of the site, but I still don’t like it. Fortunately, that is easily blocked using this same technique. You only need to tweak the userContent.css to include the additional URLs used by FeedBurner to add the FeedFlare content. (By the way, this is not a knock against FeedBurner; I use FeedBurner too. I just don’t like FeedFlare.)
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Dave Thommas
I disagree, some sites need to make money to continue their service so ads are a must. Of course you don’t want to make ads in your face all the time but it is a fact of life. I know you have a site here and you do not have ads but your site it not your method of income. For me it is and it is important for me to display my ads and have people click on them. The goal is to make sure the site is not about ads but content and then the ads, no matter how many, are just there second to the conent. So, I disagree… I think there is nothing wrong with ads in rss feeds as if the feed is good enough to be looked at then it is worth getting paid for the effort. If not then why woudl you have the feed is your list to begin with….
but, I respect your comments too.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007 at 2:30 pm
slowe
Dave,
I understand, respect, and accept the need for site owners/maintainers to earn money to support themselves and, as I said in the article, I generally end up visiting sites in my feed list (even when the sites provide a full feed) to add comments, review others’ comments, etc., so ads still get viewed. Personally, I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually clicked a web ad in the last year or two, but that’s just me. I would rather sites fall back to excerpt-only feeds than provide ads in the feed, but again that’s just me. I expect to see ads on a web page, and that’s fine; I don’t expect to see ads in RSS feeds.
Thanks for your feedback!
Monday, September 17, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Robert Ballantyne
I found this page as part of a search because I was horrified to find that TidBITS, with their new interface, are including ads in their RSS feed.
TidBITS has been one of my regular stops for well over a decade. Any article that is of interest gets a click and I go to the site. I am delighted that the folks who advertise on the site are paying the bills.
But my RSS reader (NetNewsWire) is my main source of ALL news. This is important to me. I no longer have lumber from the newspaper companies arriving at my door. I seldom see broadcast news (the family was happy to disconnect the cable as long as we have ADSL) and now don’t want it.
I am always far ahead of my friends and business associates in knowing what is interesting today in the subjects that are special to me and in general news.
This works because I can scan lots of the copy in many feeds quickly.
Ads are not a little distraction… they are huge.
For now, ads are deal-breakers. If I can obtain similar info elsewhere (or even if I cannot), I will unsubscribe to any feed that shows ads. Sorry TidBITS.
I may try the workaround suggested here, but I want to make it clear that this is not a trivial matter to me.