Yesterday I decided to go through and make sure my RSS feeds in my reader were up to date. I ended up dropping a couple where they haven’t posted anything in a while (a year), and decided that while I was doing it I’d try to see if feeds were available for some websites that I visit frequently.
Out of all the web comics that I added to the feed reader, only one (xkcd) actually had the comic in the feed. The rest, at best, gave you a feed item letting you know that a new comic had been posted and you needed to visit the site to see it.
Now, I am not stupid. I know exactly why they do this… advertising. See, most of these sites, in order to offset the cost of hosting the comic (bandwidth and all that), have advertisements. And as is the trend of ads on the web these days, most sites don’t manage their own advertising directly, they sign up with a banner providing site and then throw snippets of code on their site that will request an ad from the ad provider. They do have some control over the ads, usually the ability to block ads they don’t wish to support, and overall I suppose they do a good job of keeping the ads “on message” with the rest of the site.
My problem is… well, why can’t the code snippets live in the RSS parser as well and tack on an ad at the bottom of a feed item. Same banner image (though not the Flash “punch a monkey”/”you’ve just won two free ipod nano” ads), a line of text and a link/url to follow. The capability exists. WordPress has a plugin that does exactly that by putting a footer on RSS items. Of course, not all web comics are using WordPress, but if it exists for one system it has to be possible for other systems.
Anyway, the result is, after adding a bunch of comics to my feed reader, I then removed all of them except xkcd. For all the ones I removed, I’ll go back to visiting them when I remember to, which is usually once a month. Just think, if they put the comic and an ad in their feed, they’d make me a daily reader of both their comics and their ads…