RSS
Email
SMS
Google’s Adsense for Feeds now open to the Public
(2 votes, average: 3 out of 5)
Loading ...Email It!
After over two months of testing the program through select feed publishers, Google has now opened the flood gates for the public to enable Adsense Ads for their RSS feeds. Google, which bought the Feedburner network back in 2007, has now enabled anyone to integrate Google Adsense ads into their feeds and benefit from their program.
Recently, FeedBurner closed down new sign-ups for their FAN program, which lets publishers display FeedBurner network ads into their feeds and then monetize from them. An employee was quoted by GoogleSystem:
No new applications for FAN publishers are being accepted and we expect the broad variety of options provided through AdSense (including the new AdSense for Feeds product, powered with FeedBurner feeds) will give publishers valuable new revenue-earning potential.
Now, when you log in to your Adsense Account, you will notice the ‘Adsense for Feeds’ link. One can run through the setup for displaying the ads into his feeds. The set up is simple and Google chooses the best size to display the ads, depending upon the device that the ad is being viewed in. However, the ads will now show up in the RSS feeds yet.
Why? You may ask. Well, currently, there is no direct link between your Feeds and Google Account. For that, you can burn a new feed at the end of the set-up or wait for Google to transfer your feeds from Feedburner to their servers. Google employees recently opened up a manual process to transfer the feeds over to Google’s servers, which required the account holders to email Google’s team and await a reply. Unexpectedly, the team was bombarded with requests and the manual process has now been temporarily paused for request. What this means is, it will not take even more time for the transfer. However, Google Support says that an automated process will soon be enabled for all accounts.
One notable change after the transfer is the change in the Feed URL:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedname
has now been changed to
http://feedproxy.google.com/yourfeedname
User who actively used the Feedburner MyBrand service to use their own domains as the URL will now need to change the CNAME records from feeds.feedburner.com. to ghs.google.com. to avoid any 404 errors with the URL.
RSS as a Platform
RSS has undergone massive developments in the recent years and we’ve seen more and more websites adapting to RSS. Lately, we have seen a number of startups base and build their products around RSS. It has no longer remained a simple ‘content-delivery-tool’, but has become a great marketing tool and an amazing tool to drive traffic to your site. Internet users are making to use of RSS on a much wider scale to get more and more information right to their desktops, without the need to fire up their browsers. Services like Google Reader and NewsGator offer products that synchronize your feeds across multiple computers making sure that you get updated content, no matter where you are.
RSS as an Advertising Platform
Recently, we published an article from a guest author who spoke about RSS Advertising and the elements related to it. RSS has become a great tool for website owners, marketers and other individuals to reach out to a large number of people with a single-click of a mouse. It had become necessary to tap this great resource and start cashing in through its advantages. RSS Advertising has made sure that the advertising material still reaches to any visitor who does not wishes to visit the website, but prefers reading the content on his desktop.
Why Google?
Advertising is the most important revenue source for Google. It was an obvious move by Google to first acquire the popular service FeedBurner and then integrate its own services into it. Although it took a while, Google now hopes to speed up the process of the transfer so that its publishers can start earning right away.
Once the service is fully functional, it will enable millions of Google Adsense Publishers to generate revenue from the content that they syndicate. Websites such as TechCrunch, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb who have thousands of followers will now be able to generate revenue, even from its RSS subscribers.
But will it really work?
It is well known that the best method to monetize from your contextual ads is to integrate them into your content so that they blend and mix making the users to click on them. Millions have been made through Google’s Adsense program. It is considered one of the best programs in the marker for CPC (Cost per Cick) and CPM (Cost per Thousand Impressions) revenue. But, will integrating the same into RSS feeds really work?
Personally, I don’t think it will. Let me try and explain why.
1. RSS subscribers are comparatively more advanced than any average-Joe visitor who visits a website. The know-how of an RSS subscriber is much better than a random visitor who visits the website from a search engine result. Hence, the RSS subscribers are more likely to know about the presence of Ads in the feeds and hence are less likely to actually click on them, unless they are really interesting or important.
2. Currently, Google Adsense only allows the ads to be places at the top of your content, or at the bottom. Thus, there is no way to actually integrate your Ads and your content together.
As a result, the most the publishers could do is ad impressions.
Relevancy of Ads
Since Google’s Adsense Ads are based on their Contextual algorithm, the success of this program also depends on how well the algorithm places relevant ads into the feeds. Mashable has already had an incident where the Ad displayed was really ‘not-so-relevant‘ to the content being syndicated.
As you can see, the above is an excellent example of the Algorithm going for a toss. In the end, it all boils down to the performance of the algorithm to display the relevant and and to the user who might just be kind enough to take a look at it.
Loading ...
But adsense for feeds works with the mobile version of google reader?