As part of my ongoing commitment to reach out to law professor blogs, I highlight another of the law professor blogs I read regularly – Stephen Bainbridge’s excellent ProfessorBainbridge.com, which covers coporate law and a multitude of other topics.
Professor Bainbridge may have given us the first clear example of the use of an ad in an RSS feed with his post called Are Group Blogs Partnerships?
This ad for his book on corporate law is a good model of the tasteful informercial approach to advertising in RSS feeds that bloggers might adopt successfully. It avoids pop-ups, animations and other intrusive ad techniques. I, for one, got most of the way through the ad before I even realized that it was an ad for the book – a tribute to the professor’s writing skills.
For those, especially those in academia, fundamentally opposed to ads in feeds, I recommend this ad as a good example to study for a model of the types of tasteful and informative ways bloggers can use ads in RSS feeds as a way to monetize blogs.
I have two specific comments about this use of an ad in a feed:
1. Professor Bainbridge neglects a simple addition to the hyperlink to his book that will increase the commission he will receive on purchases through the Amazon Associates program. I’d be happy to share this technique with him.
2. Does this use of advertising undercut the credibility of Professor Bainbridge’s analysis of the legal issues that he discusses in the text of the article? For me, it does not, in part because his analysis is well-reasoned and I’m sure would be echoed by other professors and commentators. However, others might disagree.
This use of advertising in RSS feeds gives us food for thought and an excellent example of a real-world use that can be discussed as part of the “ads in feeds” debate.
As he concludes in his ad, er, post, go buy his book (but preferably from my Amazon Associates link).
Note: The ad appears to be working – only four copies of the book were in stock at Amazon.com when I published this post.
[This post originally appeared on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/.]