Here's a question...

How long before somebody designs an RSS newsreader that blocks ads in RSS feeds?

Depends on how objectionable those ads become, I suppose. But that question came to mind when I read John Battelle's Overture Testing Ads Rolled into RSS. John's all for it. He writes...

This is what I've been on about for some time now - the inclusion of a major ad network play in RSS as a step toward the monetization of RSS, and the support of full text RSS as the way to go. It's very exciting for bloggers, and marks the first major step for most of us beyond just running Adsense on our sites. As many already know, RSS is often half or more of our traffic/readership.

Well, I'm a blogger, both here and in my personal blog, and this prospect doesn't excite me at all. While I look forward to IT Garage making money (we do have that intention), I'm not sure advertising in RSS feeds is something the reader either wants or tolerates.

True, if the ads are (like AdSense's, from Google) text-based, the annoyance might be minimized. But I gotta wonder.

How about the rest of you?