Google have announced the long awaited Adsense for Feeds option for those wishing to monetize their RSS feeds. There is however one caveat; existing Feedburner users cannot gain direct access to the ad units.
There is a lot of flexibility when it comes to designing your ad. You can have the usual text only, image only or text/image ad units. You can apply the ad units to every feed, every 2nd, 3rd or 4th feed. This can be a good control mechanism if you publish a lot of content and don’t want to flood your readers with ads units, or if you want to share advertising space around several different advertisers.
A further aid to managing the flow of ad units is the size of the post. You can set the ad units to appear in feeds that are greater than some predetermined word counts. As the publisher you can select top or bottom placement of the ad units and predefine a color scheme, or let Google determine the appropriate colors.
The down side is that only Google feeds can be monetized. You can go through the process and move your Feedburner feed to a Google account and then take advantage of the ad units. For new users to Feedburner, you will set up via Google so you will be set to go from the outset.
I am surprised that Google, with all its technical know-how, couldn’t just write the ads in to existing accounts. It one more little control over what users do. Do it their way – or take the highway.
