In a very interesting article by Robin Good entitledBad RSS- Issues And Problems In Feeds Future he talks about his experience with RSS advertising and particularly Adsense Ads in RSS feeds.
On interesting observation of Robin's is that after 10,000 ad impressions over a 5-day period, he only recorded 3 clicks for a total of .33 cents. Now this stat isn't too surprising to me because as a reader of lots of feeds myself I can tell that I don't click on ads in feeds too often.
This is partly due to the fact that some ads, and particularly those that I've seen using FeedBurner, aren't as contextually relevant to me. This is why I stopped using FeedBurner ads months and months ago for my own feeds. The other reason is that I tend to automatically filter them (RSS ads) out unless keywords grab my attention within my reading context. Now, I don't necessarily find RSS ads intrusive because as I've stated in another post, I like ads when they are relevant and I do click them. But that's me and there are others who do find RSS ads intrusive. It's just that some of the RSS feeds I read are so content rich that I tend to just go straight for the content. When my time is compressed I really go straight for the content.
| What I would like to see is RSS advertising implemented in a way like Vibrant Media's IntelliTXT technology where keywords are used to contain advertiser messages |
in-context. Perhaps that would make advertising specifically within the RSS feed more effective while being less intrusive. RSS feed advertising is slightly different from advertising run on your blog in my opinion. Ads run on your blog tend to have a broader range targeting while RSS ads need to be much more contextually relevant since is a much more pure as a content medium. I'll continue to experiment with ads on blogs and in RSS feeds for further observation and evaluation.
RSS aggregators by design present only text to the reader/subscriber so the reading medium is more isolated and without additional design and advertising elements present as part of your blog design and layout. This is one reason why your message has a higher level of amplification within a RSS reader. Without other distractions, what you say is much louder and clearer and context becomes primarily important. So linking and advertising need to especially be helpful to your readers in order to be more effective.
A hyperlink within a RSS feed authoritatively connotes relevant information resource to the reader and readers click through to additional information. While I personally don't have the visibility into custom RSS advertising systems like Pheedo where control, placement and message relevancy allow for more productive advertising campaigns within RSS feeds, it seems that off-the-shelf solutions like Adsense and FeedBurner tend to be hit or miss in results and advertising message relevancy. Blog and RSS advertising continues it's nascent climb as publishers and advertisers continue to experiment and observe what works and then what works for them while eliminating what doesn't bring them the results they are seeking.
Read the entire article: Bad RSS- Issues And Problems In Feeds Future
