Good conversation going on about the future of RSS advertising: Nick Bradbury, the maker of FeedDemon, kicks it off here (in response to Dave Winer’s comments), then Alex Barnett provides one of the better breakdowns of types of RSS ads today.

I agree with Alex’s position – the market will decide what is acceptable (and therefore profitable). Getting into an arms race now around RSS ad blocking will suck up the energy from aggregrator development much the way pop-up blocking seems to have sucked the life out of browser development. (note – I love the blockers, so no flames please) The bigger concern is it could rob some legitimately interesting voices of their ability to blog for a living, which would be a shame.

Alex and Nick both touch on this – any war against RSS ads risk catching some useful voices in the crossfire.

Shifting to ad-only feeds as Winer advocates, supports the larger businesses only. It essentially destroys the ability of pure blogging businesses to make money. Blogging then reverts to a split between being a hobby for people with other day jobs and a corporate communications tool. And we lose a lot of interesting bloggers in the process. If those voices are valuable enough, readers will put up with a few ads dropped into their feeds. As Alex says, the market will decide.