Would everything be a disaster on Internet without ads?

Having email being spam free would be nice but blocking spam is a lot less precise than using an ad blocker to eliminate all kinds of ads. If we had no pop ups to worry about Internet would be nicer, but most people already get this with latest browsers.

I am all in favor of eliminating intrusive advertising methods like pop ups and spyware but I think whole idea of blocking all ads is short sighted. Tools certainly exist to block almost all forms of advertising online. I would urge you though to think twice before you activate ad blocking on all forms of advertising.

Non intrusive, in-context advertising can actually help you

I can't count number of times I've been on a web page that didn't have exactly what I was looking for but an ad on that site did. Same thing when searching Google. Sometimes listings are not relevant to kind of information I'm after but ads on side or top are.

Is all advertising evil? Of course not. Many forms of advertising can actually be helpful. Next time you're thinking about blocking that text or banner ad, think twice. You may need access to an advertiser in future. What's harm in that?

I would suggest that you keep your advertising to less than 20% of your feed. That would mean that in an RSS feed with 10 items in it, you have no more than 2 items that are advertising. I can see this number though getting dictated by likes of Google and other advertising agencies.

The advertising must add value to your visitor

The advertising will need to look like a news story in order to be successful. If it is simply tagged as advertising, click through rate will most likely be horrible. At same time though, link will need to be truly useful for someone looking for information on that particular topic. If you have a feed on maintaining a vibrant garden and advertisers' link is about being computer parts, this would very much turn off visitors and webmasters alike. Companies like Google though have become pretty good at targeting their advertisers to context of page or content so I don't see this as a big problem when using these services.

Should you add advertising to your RSS feeds? Yes, but be cautious about it. RSS feeds are truly useful to your overall marketing goals even if you abstain from putting any advertising in them.