For blogs and bloggers, RSS is a double-edged sword.
On one hand, it’s a wonderful tool to expand your blog’s distribution and readership. On the other hand, RSS sucks people away from reading your blog given they can see all your posts within an RSS reader. While this is great for blog readers, it also means all those readers aren’t seeing any of your ads…or your comments, cool widgets, new and improved design, etc.
As much as TechCrunch is more than happy to have 907,000 people subscribing to its FeedBurner RSS feed, I’m also sure Mr. Arrington and his advertisers would be happier if they were visiting techcrunch.com.
For blogs trying to make money, the big problem is advertising (aka feed-vertising) within RSS feeds has been, to date, a dud. There’s lot of talk and optimism that it will become a major advertising vehicle but there are no signs it’s happening any time soon.
For people who still believe feed-vertising is going to happen, then Google’s decision to add AdSense within RSS feeds is cause for hope. After FeedBurner announced a few months ago that AdSense for fees would be available to some publishers, the program is now open to everyone. You can read more about it at Google Operating System.
Of course, the future of feed-vertising hinges on the willingness of advertisers to do business with blogs. According to eMarketer, blog advertising in the U.S. will grow to $746-million in 2012 from $283-million in 2007. To put things in perspective, $746-million would be about 1.4% of eMarketer’s forecast for total online advertising in the U.S. in 2012.
Technorati Tags: Advertising, adsense, blogs
2 Comments
But isn’t this just a worse version of what Feedburner used to do? There’s been lots of talk about how the new Adsense for RSS feeds offering doesn’t come close to the monetization people were seeing through Feedburner. Good review on Centernetworks: http://www.centernetworks.com/feedburner-advertising-google-adsense
There is also Pheedo, which I think is used by the Gawker network.
Our approach is going to be to sell sponsorship within the feed directly rather than using any network. We’ll see if it becomes unmanageable.
>There’s lot of talk and optimism that it will become a major advertising vehicle but there are no signs it’s happening any time soon.
Defins “happening”.
Feeds running ads? Some do and for a long time already. All feeds running ads? Not all sites run ads. In between? Already happened I think.