FeedBurner, who was purchased by Google back on May 23rd, 2007 for a whopping $100 million dollars announced on May 30th that starting this week, they will be rolling out AdSense feeds for a small group of publishers. This small publishing group will act as beta testers as FeedBurner plans a full launch of the service.
According to FeedBurner,
publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory. That means you get the best of both worlds: a dedicated Google sales force that knows how and why to sell onto your content, with the added revenue that full back-fill coverage provides. And with AdSense, you’ll know that your back-filled ads are using the strongest contextual ad engine, ensuring the most relevant and profitable ads are delivered to your subscribers. And yes, ads are also sold via Google’s AdWords program.
For those of you who are not yet placing ads in your feeds but would like to do so, be sure to read the requirements to join the AdSense program.
If you would like to use AdSense for your feeds, you’ll first need to sign up for AdSense if you haven’t already. Then, set up your AdSense channels for placement targeting. This will allow advertisers to target your syndicated content specifically. According to FeedBurner, you will be able to remain in control of the campaigns that are targeted at your feed by using the Ad Review Center.
Considering there are over 934,797 publishers who have created 1,657,885 feeds with 229,542 of those being podcast and videocast feeds, there are quite a few people in the mix who are in line to make money through AdSense within their Feed.
I’m thanking my lucky stars right now that this is a feature they have provided to their end users which is a much better solution than to slap ads on every single Feed that has been created through their service. If you are looking to monetize your RSS feed, definitely keep an eye out on FeedBurner.