Monetization must reach the feed item
Monday, July 16th, 2007Tom Foremski makes a good point about Facebook aggregating everyone else’s traffic through widgets. If your site is based on ads from page views, then widgets eliminate that revenue stream. Monetizing the widget with ads is an apparent solution, but sites don’t own all the widgets using their content. Monetizing the feed delivering the content with interstitial ad items is the next step, but the growth of feed merging technology means that a site can’t be sure their feed will be delivered intact. We are getting down to the atom unit of the feed item. All items from commercial sites will have to include ads eventually. If that was the only solution, this would be OK, but I’m afraid we will see pages with ads that have widgets with ads that display feeds with interstitial ads that contain items with ads. I wonder what the click-through rate will be then?