There has been a lot of debate over the ethics of monetizing rss feeds, as well as a lot of hoopla around these ads as the ‘next big thing’ in internet advertising. Well, it appears that the concept hasn’t been as successful yet as once believed. An article at MarketingStudies explains how Google Adsense has not yet perfected the contextual RSS adverts yet, and also outlines the dismal results users have seen from the ads.

Following my post about Dick Costolo of Feedburner publicly stating that RSS feeds with ads are not losing subscribers, based on the many thousands of feeds Feedburner manages, several publishers stated just the oposite.

First was Todd Cochrane:

“Apparently the CEO of FeedBurner says that people are not un-subscribing from feeds that have Google Adsense ads in them. I am sure they are TRACKING your subscribers very CLOSELY. I talked to several people who have put RSS Ads in their feeds, and guess what, they lost subscribers no specific numbers. More importantly I have been told by at least 6 website owners that are running ads on their RSS feeds that subscribers are not clicking on the Ads! click through is as low as one or two on a 100,000 views.”

Then Robin Good added his own comment to the original article…

[Continue reading All Not Well in RSS Advertising Land?]