Feedpass Takes the High Road

In s a story somewhat related to yesterday’s and a follow up to the previously reported controversy surrounding them, Feedpass has announced that they are no longer running Adsense ads in their landing pages.

At this time, all landing pages hosted by Feedpass (see example) are completely ad free. Ads are now only shown on pages exclusively with content created by Feedpass.

This should go to great lengths to abate the previous controversy around the service, which up until its changes allowed individuals to create landing pages for any RSS feed and then insert Google Adsense ads into those landing pages for a profit. Though Feedpass would give at least equal monetary share to authors if they claimed their feed and never displayed the feed’s full content, many were very uneasy with the concept of strangers monetizing their work.

In addition to announcing the shift away from the Adsense-based model, Feedpass founder, Jim Woolley, also laid out some vague future plans for a "premium" service that will be supported by ads or paid for by the user. What features this service will have is unclear.

There will also be a revenue sharing model, however, it will not allow just anyone to profit from the feed. Instead, only feed owners who have verified themselves as such will be able to participate.

All in all, it appears that Feedpass has listened to the concerns and complaints of others and made changes accordingly. It will be interesting to see how the service moves forward from this point and if its new services are broadly accepted/used.

Technorati Tags: Plagiarism, Content Theft, Copyright Infringement, RSS, Feedpass, Copyright, Adsense, Google