It was just a matter of time, but Bloglines has added advertisements to their site. When I went to read my feeds this morning, there was an ad for T-Mobile right on the starting page:
I’ve long wondered just where Bloglines was getting revenue to support itself — it didn’t make sense to me that IAC Search & Media, its owner, was keeping Bloglines running to make my blogreading life easier. So far, I haven’t noticed advertisements on individual post or folder pages. Could those be far behind?
Interestingly, the advertisement I was shown was managed by…. DoubleClick. Which Google acquired in March 2008. Now, it seems, whether you use Google Reader or Bloglines, you’re putting advertising dollars into the Big G’s pocket.
“Succumbs”?
My first thought when I hit this was, “Oh good. IAC’s found a way to monetize Bloglines, which might keep it running…and maybe make it run better”
Money has to come from somewhere. Servers and bandwidth really aren’t free…