Dave Morgan over at Clickz has a great piece on RSS Advertising which he says is Coming Fast. He cites the experience of one of the testers (A VC) of the Overture experiment at Feedburner of contextual ads in RSS feeds which is quite positive for those of you wondering if it is a viable option. Dave’s comments were:
‘Wilson has been getting about three times the number of RSS requests for his blog as he gets page views. He’s been running contextually targeted Google AdSense ads on his site; he recently implemented a new service from FeedBurner that inserts contextually targeted Overture ads into his RSS feeds and measures feed “views.” Incredibly, after only three days of testing, he discovered the effective clicks and revenue yield from Overture ads in RSS views were almost equal to his AdSense page views. In other words, using a new technology to insert and measure ads and audience, he can monetize his existing RSS readers at a rate that should double his total online ad revenue.
Over three days, Wilson’s blog had 7,450 page views. For those same days, RSS views on his FeedBurner feed were 7,350. These RSS views account for only 30 percent of his total RSS subscribers because, as with many blogs, his RSS views are three times his Web page views. During those days, he had 36 AdSense click-through from his Web pages. He had 10 Overture clicks from his RSS feeds. If similar ads were inserted in the other 70 percent of his RSS feeds, they would very likely produce total click-through numbers that approximated his Web page yield. Wilson’s AdSense ads are optimized for his pages (they’ve been running for over a year). His Overture ads haven’t yet been optimized for his feeds, since this is the first time they ran.’
It would be interesting to hear others experiences of the Feedburner/Overture experiment. I know a few readers of this site are part of the test and would be interested in your experiences (whether you want to do it anonymously or not). I’d also be interested in hearing from anyone who can get me in on the testing if you have a contact at Feedburner as I’ve got a couple of blogs I’d like to test the system on.
