Advertising abhors a vacuum: AdSense headed for Feedburner feeds

by Brad Linder Apr 30th 2008

It's been almost a year since Google acquired RSS service Feedburner or $100 million. But in that year, we've seen very little integration of Google services into Feedburner, or vice versa. Sure, it's now easier to redirect your Blogspot feed to Feedburner, but that's about it.

Now, according to the official Feedburner blog, the company is getting ready to roll out the thing we'd all kind of been expecting: Google AdSense integration. What that means is you're probably going to start seeing much more advertising in your RSS reader.

While there are already a few ways to place ads in an RSS feed, a huge number of blogs and web sites use Feedburner to polish and publish their feeds. Being able to place ads in their feeds with just a few clicks of a button almost certainly means that many of those content publishers will be flipping the switch as soon as they can. Up until now, most web publishers viewed RSS feeds as a loss leader. You give away some of your content, ad-free, in the hopes of gaining loyal readers who will tell their friends about the site. But if you can also get a few of them to click on ads even if they rarely visit your actual web page, why wouldn't you do it?

What do you think? Are you a web publisher looking forward to Google AdSense/Feedburner integration? Or are you a loyal blog reader preparing to unsubscribe to any feeds that start displaying ads?

Tags: adsense, advertising, feedburner

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Brian said 1:05PM on 4-30-2008

I think that advertisements are just to be expected. I am willing to put up with them as long as they are minimal and not intrusive on the content. Many publishers are already including ads on the content in the RSS feeds, so this isn't really a new idea.

Gaspar said 4:10PM on 4-30-2008

I will unsubscribe at the speed of light as soon as I see the first ad, unless it's God's blog and He's speaking in first person.

Grossly simplifying, but just to give you the idea: without ads, it's a conversation. With ads, it's a business transaction between the advertiser and the blogger, in which I am *the goods* to be delivered in exchange of money.

I no longer want to be in such a position.

Quikboy said 7:38AM on 5-01-2008

I knew Google buying FeedBurner was a bad idea. Now it's just another extension of Google's grasp on the internet. Sigh.

Relequestual said 4:01PM on 5-05-2008

I'm a student, who runs my blog in my spare time, which i have very little of.
I dont make hardly any money off the adverts on it right now, so rss intergration would be really useful.
I need to pay for my hosting somehow, plus I'm about to take on a massive student loan.
Anyway, if you dont want to see adverts, just use Firefox with add blocker. I cant see they will be able to get round that.

James said 2:49PM on 5-01-2008

Actually, I was about to say the same thing, but I don't think Adblock will work. It lets you filter out individual elements (images, IFRAMEs, etc) based on their source URL, but this will actually be inserting ads inline, as I understand it, into the RSS feeds themselves. No filtering for that.

Not that I mind *too* much, as long as they're unobtrusive.

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