With the rise in popularity of RSS, a lot of content producers (and especially bloggers) are starting to pay more attention to how their feeds are presented. I’ve noted in the past that I myself spend more time in my RSS reader than I do on actual websites. I know I’m not the only one.

So it should come as no surprise that folks are lining up to get advertising and “flare” into their RSS feeds. You know what ads are. But do you know what flare is (other than the “Office Space” variety”)? You’ve seen flare, I’m sure. Flare are the little blurbs at the bottom of an article in RSS that say “Email this” or “Digg this” or “That This” or “This this”… or whatever.

Ads and flare are great ways to generate revenue and encourage interaction with your content via the feed reader. But like their counterparts on full websites, they can be taken too far. It’s quite possible to stuff your site so full of extra stuff that the main content gets lost. I hate this on websites. I hate it even more in a feed reader.

I’ve got two examples of excessive RSS stuffing to show you. I’ve removed headlines and blotted out most of the text so as not to ID any site in particular. But you should be able to see what I’m talking about here. Oh yes… and I’m back to using Google Reader… haha.

AD OVERKILL

See what I’m talking about here? The ad space is almost twice as big as the content space. I won’t get into the whole full feed vs. partial feed debate here (full feeds, people… come on… ok… so I did get into it). But even with partial feeds enabled your content should still be the primary feature in your RSS feed. Scrolling through the 20 or so posts that this site publishes each day - with that huge orange ad attached to each one - pushed my limits of tolerance. Ya’ll almost got an unsubscribe. Almost.

FLARE OVERKILL

Same problem here, except this time we’re look at flare. Maybe it’s nice twice as wide as the content. But come on. Really… is that all necessary? If people are interested enough in your content to take the time to submit it to one of these services, don’t you think they’ll take the time to click through to the article itself?

Or how about this nifty plug-in called “Share This” that lets you link up to most of this stuff with a single, unobtrusive text link (and optional icon). If I’m not mistaken, you can even pass the link through to your feed and put all of this mess in one, compact place.

Generating traffic, encouraging click-through, and getting your contented seeded to all of these places is great. I’m not in any way discouraging people from taking advantage of their RSS feeds. But moderation is the key here. I’m so turned off by the massive amount of stuff in these feeds that it seriously makes me consider dropping them.

And that illustrates the flip side of the coin. If these feeds weren’t great sources of information I would drop them… in a heartbeat. But they are great… so I read them both each day. And since they both already offer partial feeds only I have to click-through the site anyway to get that great information. Once you get to each site… again… riddled with advertising and more flare.

I could almost understand and/or sympathize with these guys if they were publishing full feeds. Folks don’t have to click-through to see your content when you offer a full feed. Monetization and interaction are much more important on full feeds than partials like these.

So pick one: full feed with tons of extra stuff… or partials with less. Don’t dupe your readers twice by offering only a partial feed AND a ton of extra advertising and feed flare.