ADVERTISING IS MAGIC.

Once I get settled into my job I'll be blogging about mass comm and new media topics more frequently, but I saw something the other day that prompted me to get ahead of myself a little. Ezra Klein had this note about the RSS feeds at his new Washington Post blog:

As you know, [the previously posted internal feed] works fine. But now the main feed is working too. The difference is pretty simple: About once every 20 or 30 posts, the main feed includes one post with an advertisement. Annoying, right? But it also helps make this blog viable. More to the point, it helps convince the Washington Post that full text RSS feeds -- which they've kindly allowed me to retain -- are viable. So though no one likes advertisements, making full-text feed more viable as a matter of revenue means they'll be more common at revenue-dependent institutions.

I don't mean to pick on Ezra at all here, since this is a notion you see frequently and his post was just the thing that made me remember I wanted to write about it. But isn't this expression of the open secret that online advertising is just noise interesting? This is one of the long-term issues with ad-supported online media that no one's really thinking about much in corporate accounting offices: People tune ads out. There's this idea among advertisers and media orgs that simply showing people ads -- for example, getting them to use the ad-interspersed RSS feeds -- is worthwhile. But even apart from tools like AdBlock Plus, people have been conditioned to use internal ad blocks. What happens when, at some point in the future, advertisers begin to realize that their magic isn't working?

Posted by Aaron S. Veenstra ::: 2009:06:21:12:37