FeedBurner Migrates RSS Ad Network to Sites

In many ways, this makes sense. While I believe that RSS has yet to peak (regardless of what others believe), it helps the ‘ol pocketbook overall to target the user as a whole and not spend so much time concerning ourselves with what method is the most ‘hip’ for the time being.

RSS advertising and metrics player FeedBurner is moving beyond feeds with its latest initiative. The company seeks to expand the volume and type of inventory it offers advertisers by enticing publishers, especially bloggers, to display its ads on their Web sites.

As with the company’s RSS ads, the site ads will be associated with individual content items such as blog posts. To participate, publishers insert a line of code in their page templates and choose whether they want an ad to run in each content item, every second item, or every third. Ads will be either in a text format or a 300×250 medium rectangle graphic ad, a size optimized to appear in the middle column of blogs.

Feedburner Vice President of Business Development Brent Hill told ClickZ he expects the offering to be most attractive to blog publishers. Hill said current ad formats on blogs, which often relegate them to a left- or right-hand column, don’t take advantage of the most common blog layout, which often results in a very lengthy, and content rich, middle column.

“What happens is people scroll down the page more often on blogs,” he said. “There’s an opportunity there for marketers to intersect with consumers.”

By entering into this category, FeedBurner puts itself in competition with contextual ad networks from Google, Yahoo Publisher Network and Kanoodle, as well as blog ad networks such as Blogads.

Hill said FeedBurner advertisers can target ads, which are priced on a CPM basis, by content category. With the site ads, they’ll also have the option of running ads on just the most recent content, or potentially running sequential ads in subsequent blog posts. It can be “almost a Burma Shave concept going through the blog,” he said. Advertisers can run just site ads, just feed ads, or both. Source: ClickZ Network