I’ve been approved as one of the beta testers for Google’s new AdSense for RSS feeds. So I’m going to be running Google ads in my feed for a few weeks at least – purely for research purposes of course 😉
Now before you get all righteous on me, remember this is a test. If the ads aren’t contextual enough, or they detract from my writing, or readers threaten me with bodily harm – then I’ll take the ads away.
But as I’ve stated before, essentially RSS feeds are no different from HTML webpages in this Web 2.0 world. RSS and HTML are the primary means of publishing and viewing content on the Web today. Indeed, RSS is arguably more important than HTML nowadays, especially for blogs. So if I put ads on my website (which I do), why not put them in my RSS feed too?
The other thing is that it’s an incentive for publishers to use a full-text RSS feed. I’ve always done that anyway, because of what I outlined above – RSS is (what I call) a “first-class citizen” of content publishing. However a lot of people still publish excerpted feeds and so ads may be the tipping point for full-text feeds.
That’s all the theory anyway, let’s see how it pans out. I’m very interested to see how contextual the ads are, given this is a topic-focused blog. I’m interested in how readers react to the ads. And of course I’m keen to see if I make more than coffee money from them. Feel free to email or leave comments if you have feedback about the ads.
