This week’s poll of the week asks:
‘Do You Run RSS Ads in any of Your Blog’s Feeds?’
Feel free to discuss your answers here.
Particularly you might like to discuss the follow up questions of ‘Are they Worth their While for you?‘
I ask this because while I see an increasing number of blogs with ads in their feeds I’m yet to meet too many bloggers who make much from them. Interested to hear your experiences.
I don’t use them and don’t see the need to either. I’d rather set my RSS feed to display excerpts of my content and get readers to visit my blog than to try and target ads at them via RSS.
Darren, you do a pretty good job of RSS excerpts, but I feel a couple more characters would really do it justice. :-)
It’s a toss up between, do you want more hits to your site, or a couple more cents from ads. As you say, I can’t see people making much from RSS ads.
How does one run ads in their RSS feeds? Did you write about this before now and i’m just being dumb!
I have wanted to in the past, but its not worth the trouble for me at this point. I just don’t have enough readers to warrant that.
We run an ad-free full content RSS feed. I believe that full-content makes it more enjoyable for regular readers, who may only come to the site very infrequently, but that’s ok.
Our daily visitor count is about 10x our feed count, and about equal to our search-referrals. Maybe that’s because we’re so new (accidental tourists that click on ads anyway, not the regular readers. We hope that our subscribers are a source of viral marketing, and don’t rely on them for ads.
I’m really curious what other people’s strategies are about this.
Thanks Darren for a good poll and a great site!
Oops – tried to include [em] tags and it mangled the previous post. here’s the full content:
We run an ad-free full content RSS feed. I believe that full-content makes it more enjoyable for regular readers, who may only come to the site very infrequently, but that’s ok.
Our daily visitor count is about 10x our feed count, and about equal to our search-referrals. Maybe that’s because we’re so new (
I recently added YPN ads to my RSS feed.
Zero income, but they aren’t very good ads.
Google is still in beta on RSS and didn’t offer to let me join the beta.
To answer the “How does one run ads in their RSS feeds” question: YPN provides the code to add in to your feed. They actually provide code to stick into templates for popular blogging formats, but if you do your own RSS generation as I do, it’s not hard to figure out what you need to do: basically it’s just assigning a unique id to each post.
I would like to try rss ads, but Google wants at least 100 readers of the feed, and I’ve only about … 21 at the most :-(
Everybody else visites the blog, so perhaps that isn’t so bad after all.
When I’m reading someone else’s feeds I HATE to see ads. I usually stop reading RSS feeds when they include ads. Most feeds only contain excerpts of full articles, so if I’m interested I’ll go to the site to read the whole article. There I’ll see ads.
Britt…don’t feel bad…I’ve got 200 and Google still said no :(
I tend to think that people who read blogs through RSS readers are a little more savvy and are likely just to ignore the ads totally.
Duh?
BANDWIDTH, BANDWIDTH, BANDWIDTH
Interesting read. But how do you apply for google rss ads? And how about an example? Third besides google are there any more ad companies?
I just requested for feed ads right before I read this post and I’m rejected as well. Probably Google rejected those who entered 100-499 in the request form.
I run ads on RSS feeds, and I am happy with the results. Tried Google AdSense for Feeds, but if you have more than 500 readers then I certaily recommend Feedburner and their new services…
Hi again
M Freitas: FeedBurner is absolutely brilliant, but you still have to apply to a Google AdSense for Feeds account (http://services.google.com/ads_inquiry/aff).
Jon and Leon: How strange that Google rejected your requests :-( I wonder what criterias they use, because they only write “more than 100 active subscribers”.
If we are talking about third party ads like YPN / Google ads then No I have no ads in my RSS feeds.
I agree with JBagley with the comment “do you want more hits to your site, or a couple more cents from ads”. I want my users to interact with the site, rather than just read. If my site was just a blog focusing on text content, then maybe. The blog side of the site is just there to get the users, not as the sole purpose.
I also have a personal hate thing going on with ads in RSS feeds. I use a custom PHP script that I am perfecting to strip ads out. If it can be called an ad, I will most likely remove it before I see it.
It is a bit of a balance between “more hits to your site” / “more revenue” / “Annoying the user with ads”
Google Reject Those Who Is Below 500 readers Hopes Google Adsense For Feeds Will Out Of Beta Soon .Right Now I Have Only 34 Readers Hopes To Get 500 When Ad Feeds Out Of Beta
Darren, there are some of us who would like to use RSS Feed ads. Since i am primarily depending on Adsense i want to use their RSS feed ads. but it seems that their beta is closed. i suggest that you ad another option on the poll for those who want to use adsense rss but cannot. just a suggestion…
Tried it with YPN a few months ago. The ads were irrelevant and didn’t fit the content. They made no income. They annoyed me. I lost a few rss subscribers soon after I added them.
That is all.
[…] Comment on the poll were at this post. […]
RSS ads are the most useless and inefficient idea ever. Anyone able to prove me wrong ?
Don’t know how to use it. How can I use RSS feeds to improve my traffic? I went to different forums and posted the same question to see if someone could help me. No luck.