Ads in RSS
Recently posted this on Doc's IT Garage.

There are many blogs out there that use AdSense to make a little beer money and it generally works very well. The Google system has an uncanny knack of posting mostly relevant ads for the blog or blog post. It's also fairly unobtrusive.

Since I think Ads in RSS is inevitable, we should be arguing about finding an approach that mirrors this rather than whether they should be there at all. The Ads should be unobtrusive, and well targeted. I don't think that creating dummy items answers this. Neither do I think that leaving it to the aggregator works. ISTM that the best approach is a simple, short text ad added to the end of the description.

I've asked Google if they have or are thinking of extending AdSense to provide a service like this to content publishers and I got the expected non-reply that didn't say anything beyond "please don't put AdSense into RSS". There are some technical issues as well. Bear in mind that AdSense currently relies heavily on javascript and CSS which is likely to be stripped by any well behaved Aggregator. There's also a timing issue. Google is bad at targeting the ad correctly before it has spidered the specific page. And yet we're usually creating the RSS immediately after creating the post.

I'm going to try and create a proof of concept to see how well this works by using the GET call to AdSense and then stripping out the important bits from the Ad (title, link and text) before inserting it into RSS.

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[ 20-Nov-04 6:11pm ] [ , , ]