Advertising in Blog RSS Feeds
D.L. Byron of Blog Business Summit has some interesting things to say about the state of the blogosphere. If you’re using your blog as a marketing tool, to gain passive revenue (hey, EFT Bloggers - this means you!) and especially, revenue by text advertising, you’ll want to give the below a good read. Ad feeds in RSS - something we were discussing over at EasyBake Weblogs not long ago. Cross-posted the below there as well. If you’re making a lot of your income through advertising, you may want to pay heed to this:
Earlier this week, Keith removed ads from his RSS feeds because they weren’t generating any revenue. Roger Johansson removed them as well. A problem with ads in feeds is that they’re not contextual (see Slashdot’s feed for an example). Adsense for feeds has much better text matching and text ads work, when they get the user to their goal. But in RSS, the goal is to read the feed, not specifically find a product or topic.
Headlines, blurbs, links
If others find that RSS ads aren’t working, we may also see bloggers returning to summary posts in RSS because they’ll want to drive readers to their sites and ads. Summaries v. full posts in RSS has been debated at length. Where some argue that design is secondary to the text and want the full post, others argue that the text is meant to be read in the context of the site and RSS is good for headlines, blurbs, links. NY Times and BBC News continue to offer summary posts, as noted by Dave Winer in his response to a comment from Calcanis on RSS ads. Winer also notes that, “RSS itself is an advertising medium,” because its driving readers to the site where the ads are. I haven’t seen this yet, but a visual, interstitial ad between the “read more” in your RSS and web page maybe coming. . .
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