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Adsense for Feeds Rolling Out for Select Few

Adsense for Feeds Rolling Out for Select Few

As in Adsense for feeds via Feedburner. From the blog post:

We’ve been hinting at this for awhile, but it’s finally time to spill the beans: Starting next week, we’ll be rolling out AdSense for feeds to a small group of publishers, in anticipation of a full launch to all FeedBurner and AdSense publishers “coming soon”. If you start seeing “Ads by Google” on an ad in a feed somewhere, that’d be us.


The ads are sold via the AdWords program, just like regular Adsense ads. When everything is rolled out, anyone eligible for Adsense ads will be able to roll out their own ads in feeds.

This is apparently pissing people off, no doubt because it’s probably harder to filter out ads in the full feeds they subscribe to, rather than block ’em on the web. Webmaster-Source rants a bit about it, being pissed off that people essentially don’t want ads in their feeds.

Ads in feeds aren’t anything new, but with Adsense it will probably change from small text links to more traditional ad formats. This means that you’ll have to accept ads even in your feed reader in the coming future, which might be a reason enough to visit the original site, rather than reading the feed. It might also mean that full RSS feeds will be less attractive in the future, and feeds overall will be used more like a notification of that there are updates, rather than an actual way to read the content. Or you can read the content, but with ads, via RSS.

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Personally, I hope and think that this will change the way we use RSS feeds. After all, a well-designed site with ads is always preferred to a poorly rendered RSS feed with bulky advertisements and poor graphic placements.

What do you think? How will this change feeds and the way we use them?

View Comments (2)
  • Oh my! I love reading Newsfeeds in my Newsreader and I really am annoyed if I have to go to the website. There comes a time when you start getting used to very simple looking posts as they appear in Google Reader, NetNewsWire, etc… and you stop being interested in the designs of the original sites.

    When ads will conquer even this sector and way of reading, things will change. Or perhaps we will have to pay fees for ad-less feeds. Or I will drink more coffee.

  • Ads in RSS feeds aren’t going to change how I read feeds, I go through all of my feeds starring items that I want to read later and then when I want to read it I read it on the actual web page.

    One question I have is what this will mean to FeedBurner ads, will they be taking new publishers or will it eventually be rolled into Adsense for feeds?

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