AdSense Comes to RSS

Google is still the reigning champion of monetizing the internet. With it’s firm hold on the search advertising niche and ever increasing variety of keyword based ad content types, the search giant looks like it will hold the crown for a while. Cementing that theory is today’s announcement that its popular Adsense revenue program will now be offered in your RSS feeds, a service that has been touted as “on its way” on the Feedburner site for months.

I can say I’m honestly fairly excited to see AdSense for RSS, since I make my living writing online. Others in the tech world have mixed feelings about the issue. I personally think it might bridge some of the gaps between content generators and readers, like full versus partial feeds. For example, if I have a chance to monetize my feed, I may be more likely to create a full feed, rather than trying to bring eyes over to the actual site.

Others think that having AdSense ads in RSS feeds might contribute to the issue of a fragmented online conversation, and create even more questions about who owns the content and comments that are generated online once they leave the blog or web site. This has been at the forefront of the web for weeks now, with several articles appearing here and elsewhere addressing the ownership of the conversation and programs like SezWho and Disqus or site like the annoying FriendFeed .

Google must follow the new tradition of the Twitter-generated bitchmeme . By dropping this news so close to the weekend, they guaranteed a full three days of arguing on Twitter , FriendFeed, Disqus and blogs about why this is or is not a good idea [insert your opinion here]. That’s smart advertising, which is not surprising coming from the advertising champ. Already it has generated conversations about ads in feeds from the likes of Steve Hodson , Louis Grey , Corvida of SheGeeks and more.

I’m not entirely sure what all the fuss is about as far as the actual news goes: having a reliable way to monetize feeds is good for bloggers and other online types. There is no downside if you make your living on the web. That said, there are plenty of regular people out there who are tired of seeing ads everywhere they go online, and it will be up to the people who make the feed reading clients if they offer ways to opt out of ads, like some web browsers do.

As far as the bitchmeme about ownership of the feed, I am not clear on what that has to do with AdSense beyond the fact that having AdSense available may encourage more use of full feeds, thus opening content up for possible scraping. I am one of the people who comes down on the side of the argument that comments should stay on the blog. to that end I am holding out on using Disqus until it offers that as an option (along with importing the old comments, and ways to download backups of comments in case it goes down), and I use FriendFeed only because people I need to talk to use it. None of those fragmented content sites have much to do with AdSense that I can see, so I’ll be following this conversation closely to find enlightenment on the issue.