Six Weeks ago TLA announced their new RSS Advertising system – Feedvertising (aff). I was one of the publishers who had already been beta testing it for a couple of weeks and so have now been using it for two months.
I thought it was time for an updated review of it.
Since starting out with Feedvertising I am happy to report that it is the best performing and most effective RSS advertising system that I’ve come across.
I’ve been testing it solely on ProBlogger’s feed for the time being but in the coming weeks will add it to a couple of my other WordPress based blogs (to this point it’s only available to WP 2.0 publishers – one of it’s few weak points).
A quick recap on what Feedvertising is:
- It’s a WP plugin based system
- It inserts text ads into your blog’s RSS (at the base of each post)
- It allows you to either sell ads yourself privately, run your own ads (ie to promote your other sites) or to sell ads through TLA’s marketplace
I’ve opted to run a few of my own ads and let TLA sell the rest to the advertisers already in their system.
Initially I set it to sell just two ads and ran six of my own (to promote my job boards etc) but once the first two sold in a matter of days released two more ad slots to advertisers. These two also have been filled and so now I’ve released two more spots for advertisers today.
The price of ads is determined by a combination of the category of your blog, your blog’s alexa ranking and bloglines subscriber numbers. As a result ProBlogger does pretty well at bringing in a decent amount that far exceeds anything I’ve managed to earn from RSS advertising using other systems like AdSense or Feedburner.
Obviously the number of ads that you sell will depend upon the profile of your blog – but for me so far it’s been quite worthwhile.
A couple of weaknesses or suggestions for how Feedvertising could improve:
- stats on how the ads are performing – I’ve no way to know if my own internal ads convert at all
- it is only available to WP 2.0 users (I’m sure they’re working on expanding – I know I’d love to run it on my MT blogs also)
- demand of advertisers to impact pricing – ie when ads sell out it’d be nice to see the ad rate go up or for publishers to be able to override TLA’s pricing (similar to what Performancing’s Partners system allows). While there is scope to build your ad revenue by building the ranking of your blog and bloglines subscriber numbers it would also be nice to make more if there is demand.
- I’d love to be able to automate the ability to fill empty slots with your own ads. At present you nominate how many ads are for sale in the market place and how many are your own ads. If the ads in the marketplace don’t sell there’s no way to fill that ad rotation with an extra one of your own.
Overall the strengths of this system far outweigh the weaknesses. It’s easy to install, it’s very low maintenance to run and I really like the option to run your own ads through the rotation. They also don’t seem to have a minimum level of traffic for you to join up for it as a blogger – unlike AdSense and Feedburner’s RSS advertising options which are only for more highly trafficked blogs.
If you’re a WP blogger looking for a way to monetize your RSS feed I’d definitely recommend giving Feedvertising a go.
Darren, are you using WordPress 2.0.5?
Is the plugin working fine with it?
For me it doesn’t work with 2.0.5 and TLA told me that they are working on the issue.
Is it this plugin that causes your feeds to show updated posts when there aren’t in fact any updated posts? I have become a bit irritated with ProBlogger feeds lately. For example: today, BlogLines said you had 16 new/updated posts, whereas in fact there were only two new posts. I wondered if BlogLines saw a new ad as an update to the post.
You could try using a script like ShortURL inside your ads, that way you could track which links were being clicked.
How much money does this program make? Is it worth it if you only have a hundred people subscribed to your feed?