Google’s RSS Ads

A blogger applies for Adsense RSS and finds “As I had suspected, during the inital testing phase they are only accepting blogger.com and Movable Type/ TypePad blogs as of this time.” I would love to know from someone at Google (maybe Jason Shellen?) if there was any technical or logistical reason they decided not to support the 140,000+ WordPress users or if it was just a lack of communication, which is entirely possible (and very plausible considering how busy everyone is). I would encourage WP users to sign up for Adsense for Feeds and list “WordPress” in the “Other” field. Update: Communication has started. (Thanks, Jason F.!)

26 thoughts on “Google’s RSS Ads

  1. I just signed up for Linux Log. I’ve got around 7700 unique IPs on my rss feeds every month. They’d be stupid not to let me try it out, especially considering that I already use their adsense on my site.

  2. I’m wondering, does anyone actually get any money from adsense? I’m serious here, is it economically clever to put it on? How many people actually make any money off this sort of thing?

  3.  
    I would encourage WP users to sign up for Adsense for Feeds…
     

    I would discourage WP users from signing up for Adsense for Feeds… people who syndicate loathe commercials.

  4. khaled – I have adsense ads, and I do get money from them. It’s not enough to live on, but it’s enough to pay for my hosting bills, and that’s the whole point of it. Good content is not free. You can either pay for it, or let the ads pay for it.

  5. I’m wondering, does anyone actually get any money from adsense?

    I wouldn’t call my site popular at all, but I make enough in about 6 months from my main site to pay for a year’s worth of hosting etc. on it and 3 other smaller sites too. I definitely reccommend it if you’re looking for a simple way to cover expenses.

  6. Although it is not something measurable, you will need near 100,000 daily visitors to make ends meet with just AdSense. It depends greatly on the part of the world you live in.

  7. “I think it depends mostly on the contextual market around what you write about.”

    Yup. I’ve got adsense on my personal blog, and on my War on Spam blog. Between the two of them, I earn about $100 every 3-4 months — not much, but enough to make it worth keeping on the site.

    The interesting thing is that my personal blog gets far more hits than the WoS blog (about 4 times as much traffic). But at least 2/3rds of the revenue is generated by the WoS site, because it’s more targetted, and it’s on a topic that has commercial products related to it.

  8. I don’t use advertising on my blog (I am based in the UK and hosting here is pretty cheap) but as a blog READER I much prefer AdSense boxes to popups or brightly-coloured ad-banners (both of which I have Firefox extensions to block completely). So even though AdSense might not make as much per view as other revenue sources, it is less likely to a)Cost you readers (by definition reduces ad revenue) and b)Get blocked by people using proper browsers

  9. The good thing here is that ads in RSS are going to save the web.
    I mean, RSS feeds almost killed the web : you spent countless hours on a layout, gfx and css, and readers practically never see them because they read what you write in an unstyled raw RSS feed reader.
    Now, if there are ads in feeds, feeds are much less interesting, so maybe readers are coming back to regular websites :Þ

  10. one site i run for a non-profit club makes over $600 a month, it jumped to that when i changed the ad format to a block in one section, previously it had been running at just over $100 a month, now it’s worth my time to deal with this area of the site. this pays the hosting and some bb bills and then some, there are a few posts on webmasterworld.com about people quiting thier job for adsense powered sites!

    of course my blog makes about $5 a month but i get no traffic at the moment.

  11. It is worth it. Some sites alone make $1,000 a day. I saw that on the weblogs. inc. website. Their network that is makes $1000 plus per day which includes Engadget and Mark Cuban’s blog.

  12. Now this is curious — why would they offer an ‘other’ field if they were just accepting Blogger and SixApart blogging interfaces? Sounds a bit discriminatory, but I’d like to hear their reasoning.

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