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Google Ads for RSS Feeds Goes Beta
flood6 writes "Google has launched their service to offer contextual ads via their AdSense program through RSS feeds. The program is currently in Beta but will allow webmasters who offer RSS feeds of their content to include ads in the feeds (which often appear on other websites or through aggregators); someone clicks on the ad, the owner of the feed makes a little scratch."
Slashdot has RSS ads... but they also place the entire article listed on the site in the RSS feed. I can understand that a little better...
However, listing in a typical RSS feed (with just titles and summeries) is dumb. It's like a porn site where you never know if you are going to click on something legit or an ad.
Google is simply pursuing one more avenue of content delivery for their advertisers. Those who wish to find ways to try and block the new ads should take note of one important thing, however: Google's ads are teeny, unintrusive, and even I find myself clicking on them often. Consider the repercussions of trying to block the RSS ads as equivalent to commercial skip on TiVO - advertisers pay for everything, and the deliverer of them makes less.
I, for one, like to see Google make money.
and tags into the feed which contains ads.
Don't style the rss feed! If the links doesn't go to your site and you want ads, then don't offer the bloody feed!
While ads can be annoying, Google is at least taking steps to make it "less evil". But you do realize that Google is an advertising company, don't you? Advertising is what they are getting revenues from. They are just trying to be responsible about it.
Clever signature text goes here.
Google is no longer a search engine/content delivery service. WE are now the product being sold by Google.
Sure it's no different fro how television and radio stations make money, but I think we need to face the fact that Google now exists primarily to sell ads.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
for those that jump on the adblock bandwagon, i hope you are realizing a long term effect of your behavoir. publishing good content costs money, and many sites are funded via adsesne. if you keep blocking ads publishers will either stop publishing or start making money in a different way.
whether you realize it or not, adsense is the first mainstream micropayment system. with the proliferation of ad blocking comes the next gen internet when you have to pay 5 cents to view some page etc. are targeted text ads really that annoying?
It just gets annoying after a while to see all the adds in your favorite RSS feed. Won't this just make people unsubscribe or use a RSS reader than filters out the ads?
The moment I saw google serving up adverts in the style of those fake system warning messages, was the day everything from */pagead/* got squished by my adblock filter.
They've only got themselves to blame.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
I actually wrote my news aggregator as a direct response to ads - when Slashdot went off on its "ads and subscriptions" idea and Yahoo's front page turned into an ad-fest instead of an information source, I whipped that up to collect news for me. I guess I will just have to change it to remove links that check in with Google's ad server if I need to...
Posted from the wireless couch.
Technorati works by reading RSS feeds and then letting you search the feed item descriptions and content. Will Technorati end up being a minefield of Google ads? I assume they'll start parsing them out, and maybe banning feeds that use them. Maybe. Maybe not, since their profit model is based on Google ads as well.
Google has banned some spam blogs from their seach listings, but really, what's the difference between a spam blog with an RSS feed that makes money with Google ads, and Google droping ads directly into a feed?
Someone help my simple mind grok the difference.
Why do companies on the web insist on click through ads? I can't click through on TV, Radio or Billboards and they've work fine for decades?
A short message to increase brand awareness is often all thats needed.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
"And for those webmasters who use advertising to survive, may the Force be with you. I understand the bargain you make, and I will still read your sites, and if you find a particularly clever and targeted ad, why I might even view it. It's a complicated issue."
I think if webmasters and ad creators would put a little thought into making ads look nice and not saturating a page with too many of them, I would have no problems with them, just as I have no problems with ads in magazines. If they blink, move rapidly, garish colors, etc. or heaven-forbid popup I'll ignore/block them in a heartbeat. Some ads (like IBM's flash ads come to mind) are well-designed, interesting, and aren't bad at all.
I know the margins are small, but for goodness sakes use some common sense and get someone with some artistic talent to do this stuff...
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
If this encourages more people to use RSS feeds, then that will be a good thing. As far as I know, google still haven't implemented a system to allow Advertisers to choose which site \ RSS feed they will be listed on. Until this happens, most users shouldn't have a problem with the Google system as there's no way for advertisers (apart from Google) to wield undue influence on the publishers.
I'm not going to do it but ..
I run a website which has articles on it, each article has one google advert on it.
But relative to my article bandwidth the RDF feeds I host (which only contain the 'intro' to an article and a link to the full thing) consume something like 66% of my bandwith.
When you have a lot of users each checking the feed through livebookmarks, KNewsticker, etc, that adds up quickly.
Especially when they poll the feeds at regular, but essentially random, intervals.
I know /. has a bit on their feed page saying clients will be banned if they poll too agressively, but sadly I've not got code to handle that yet.
It is tempting to try to offset the cost of that bandwidth by using feed adverts - but I think the drawbacks outweight the benefits for now.
OTOH, for some people personalized ads could very well be about enlarging certain parts of their bodies...
In 90% of Adsense 'installs', they look every bit as annoying as a banner. They disrupt the layout and keep my eye from scanning through to the text/info/photos on the page that I came to see. I came to read, not to have someone try to snooker me into buying shit I don't want.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Well I don't know about the rest of you but I use RSS as a souce of clean content to parse for a particular purpose. If they start adding in ads its going to culture up my nice clean data sources. I think that a better way to do this would be something like an email ad campaign opt-in. Where I would agree to get an email advertisement once and a while inexchange for a clean RSS feed.
just because your a schizophrenic doesn't mean people arn't really out to get you
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