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Viigo RSS Reader Now Has Advertising

January 23rd, 2008 by Ronen Halevy

Some of you may have noticed that if you go to the Viigo Bulletins feed in Viigo you will now see an ad for American Express. A bit back ago we mentioned the fact that the Viigo logo banner had grown in the latest release. After speaking to Viigo CEO Mark Ruddock I now know that this was done to support mobile compliant ads in Viigo. He has also promised me that in the next 2 months we will be seeing some significant upgrades in the Viigo experience so stay tuned!

ViigoAdvertising[1]

Personally I thought that this was a long time coming. Viigo has consistently been the top RSS reader for BlackBerry. I always wondered how Viigo was going to stick around if they gave away their product free. You can’t really sustain a revenue model like that. It turns out that ads are their answer.

Viigo has done a good job of keeping the ads as unobtrusive as possible. This has to be one of the best executions of mobile advertising I have seen to date. Don’t get me wrong, I would rather no ads but I concede the fact that Viigo needs to make money to continue doing business. So far their only advertiser seems to be American Express. I have seen some bad mobile advertising in applications before (Pocket Express) so I have something to compare against Viigo.

Let me explain why:

  • Most importantly when you enter a feed that has ads, your selection is not defaulted to the ad. Many websites I have seen do this and it really annoys me when they put the ad “in your face.”
  • Second of all there are no ads on the homepage of Viigo. Mark told me that they will not be placing ads on that page.
  • The Viigo ads are only placed on feeds where Viigo has the explicit permission of the owners to do so
  • Viigo will also be sharing the advertising proceeds with the authors  (Nice!  More money for review products)
  • According to Mark Ruddock the ads support many cool features like click to view, click to call, click to email, and more. The ads actually take you to a mobile site.
  • Also Mark told me that the ads are cached locally on the device so they do not consume data constantly

Okay that is enough for now. I just thought I would give you a heads up in case you started to see ads in Viigo like it did. If you are a privacy conscious individual I would recommend reading over their privacy policy to make sure your information is protected.

The main fault I found with the current implementation of ads in Viigo is that when you click on one you are taken to the browser but when you hit the back button you are not returned to Viigo.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008 and is filed under Free Software, News, RSS, Utilities.

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