This week I started using the RSS feed functionality (or what Google brands “Web Clips”) which displays my subscribed headlines in the real estate at the top of your inbox.
What surprised me was that Google (seemingly for the first time) has decided to share sponsored content in the same location and in the same form as user requested content (my RSS feeds). I realized this one morning as I was reading my feed headlines using this new helpful feature and realized that my eyes had been hijacked. I was reading “New Year’s Party Ideas – www.bhg.com – New Year’s made easy…”
I had not subscribed to this feed, had never been to BHG, and am not particularly interested in planning a New Year’s Party (much rather be skiing). Yet Google was sharing it with me. In a word, SPAM.
This appears to move against two guidelines that I thought Google believed: show only “targeted” advertising (e.g. ads relevant to my search or content) and do it in a defined space that is clearly known to the user (e.g. top or right side). I wonder if this is an isolated incident or if more examples like this are on the way. For example perhaps they might start swapping out the 3rd entry in the search results with a sponsored text-ad. Sure they’ll label it “sponsored” but the key is that I’m not expecting it to be there as a user and so I can’t avoid reading it.
