I thought the idea behind Google Reader was that they would be able to show you ads. They bought Feedburner which was supposed to offer an easy way to put Adsense in your feeds, but it never really took off.

the person hosting the RSS can put a preview rather than the full content if they want ad revenue

Exactly.

Title-only RSS is so much better than email notification.

Above-the-fold-only at least, please!

> Above-the-fold-only at least, please!

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

We knew that 20 years ago, yet the entire world slacked off on pushing a concrete solution. Hopefully that starts changing.

A few fractions of a percent tech professionals pushing for what's right is nice but not nearly good enough.

20 years ago they launched Google Reader to do exactly that. ~10 years ago they killed that, too.

Embrace, extend, extinguish. Not a new thing. If somebody still trusts corporations in 2024 then that's on them.

Once I fully embraced the fact that Google is an ad company -- not a software company -- their behavior doesn't pique my interest anymore. I don't rely on any of their software or services.

But I wish generally they would stop hoovering up and monetizing my personal data. F'ckers.

Agreed on all accounts, though it is difficult to argue that YouTube is an indispensable service for many goals (education included).

I think YouTube is an example of where Google would rather sell you a service (YouTube Premium) than an ever-increasing number of ads (including ads for YouTube Premium). Google makes more money from Premium users. Creators get paid more for Premium views. The experience is better for everyone but your wallet's a bit lighter.

Google and Facebook make most of its money off ads because the reality is that users don't like paying for stuff directly.

I am a bit skeptical that they don't try to monetize Premium users as well -- I mean invisibly, by selling our viewing history, timing of when we watch stuff etc. But I can't do anything about that and I openly admit all my efforts to block YouTube ads on an iPhone have failed so I eventually gave up and just bought Premium.

And to be fair, I don't regret it, because I have another consideration -- I can easily get some nice Xiaomi phone and root it and install various blockers and alternative YouTube frontends... BUT... my Google account is very valuable, a lot is tied to it and Google has become a bit trigger-happy banning and deleting accounts. So I am not willing to risk it. Hence I paid up.

My understanding is that Google does not sell user data to 3rd parties. It's much more profitable for Google to sell targeted ads that indirectly use that data (without giving the data away), and also avoids the potential legal and PR ramifications of selling user data, especially since users trust Google with a lot of their personal data.

They might use your viewing history to target ads in other places. And they definitely use aggregate/anonymized viewing patterns to suggest similar videos people might like, but I don't see an issue with that.

Same goes for podcasts, which are RSS too, and those are still a thing.

Barely hanging on by nature of being an open format and Apple generously hosting the feed index publicly. But even that gets challenged now that most people switch to Spotify to listen to "podcasts" there - and those are completely siloed.

You’ll be happy to hear that Spotify recently got rid of that paywall and you can now find all of their original podcasts including J Rogan on Apple Podcasts etc. Must have been a tax write-off?

But the ads are baked into the content.

If you can bake ads into audio, you can bake them into text.

Sometimes it is, in the form of paid articles. Or make the RSS text portion only a preview of the full thing.

That was also the case for blogs and youtube videos. RSS just brought you to the content and the content had ads.