12% Of A-List Blogs Advertise In Their Feeds

I am a little ambivalent as to the potential of feed advertising. Part of me says it's a great idea and that your monetizing bits of you're content which may have previously been off limits. On the other hand I am finding increasing irritation at finding ads in my feeds and can't really pinpoint why. I guess it's because when you're scanning a gazillion feeds, things that get in the way can act like small, but irritating parasites that you just want to swat out of the way. Certainly some of the reports coming back from many bloggers are less than exciting about it's revenue potential.

However, like most things I guess it's a numbers game. 200,000 subscriptions to your feed and it's not going to be a waste of time incorporating them, particularly as some RSS Ad Programs will be CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions). The irritant factor probably becomes less significant if the quality of a subscriptions content is worth it. A more marginal feed and it probably makes me a little trigger happy on the delete button, when I undertake my monthly cull. This is a quandary that bloggers all over the world will be weighing up and experimenting with. Particularly in light of the recent release of Feedster with full automation of their RSS ads program, and also Feedburner announcing that they will launch their own RSS ad network.

Anyway in light of the above Ads On Blogs have analysed the number of A-list blogs currently utilising RSS advertising and can confirm that only 12.2% are participating. By A-list I am referring to the Ads On Blogs 500 analysis of the Feedster 500.

As this is a developing strand in contextual advertising this figure may not be terribly significant, plus you've also got to allow for the fact that Google and Yahoo's offerings are still in beta. However, I can't help feeling that RSS advertising should have taken greater strides forward by now.

Tags: rss, advertising, blogs, feeds, Syndication,