Today I was chatting with someone that subscribes to ProBlogger via email through the Feedburner RSS to Email service that we offer readers and they mentioned in passing that they see the AdSense ads in the emails that they receive.
At first I was a little taken aback by this. AdSense don’t allow their ads to be sent via email – it has always been in their Terms of Service. I know this because publishers have been asking for it to be allowed for years.
So on getting home just now I’ve checked my inbox in Gmail to see my latest email updates from my sites and sure enough – there are AdSense ads in them.
Here’s how they look on my photography blog’s daily updates:
and another one:
The ads are AdSense for RSS ads that I run in my feeds (and have done for a while). They appear at the bottom of each of my posts when someone is viewing them via RSS – but it also appears that they’re showing up in some emails. I say SOME emails because when I view these same emails in my Apple Mail email client I don’t see the ads – but in my Gmail I do.
The person who told me about this also uses Gmail. I’m yet to test it using any other email client but it could just be that they show in Gmail.
I’m not sure if Google’s Feedburner or AdSense or Gmail teams (or a combination of them) are just testing this temporarily or if it is a permanent thing but as a publisher I’m definitely not disappointed by it – it means more ad impressions!
Have you seen AdSense ads like this in RSS to email subscriptions that you have? If so – what email clients have you seen them in? Just Gmail or are they appearing in other email clients too?
update: It seems AdSense did announce this previously – check out the last paragraph on this post on their blog (thanks to @mvizdos on twitter for the link). Question is – when are they going to let those of us with newsletters add AdSense to our emails!? I’d love that!
