Yep It’s Coming… AdSense in RSS Feeds

Late last week, Steve from FeedBurner (owned by Google) posted an entry explaining that you will soon be able to login to your FeedBurner account using your Google account. This isn’t really that exciting but it does mean that Google can now tie even more together.

The juicy part of the entry was Steve’s comments regarding the FeedBurner integration with Google AdSense. Steve noted:

FeedBurner will start to look and feel more like a set of Google services, and we will be completing much tighter integration into other Google services such as Google AdSense. (If you are a feed advertiser, don’t worry: we have some happy surprises coming for you as well, and if you are an advertiser who is not yet a feed advertiser, you too shall be blessed with good fortune.)

Last month I asked whether FeedBurner had given up on its own ad network. Note that FeedBurner currently serves over 1.5 million feeds. The FeedBurner ad network was one of my absolute favorites over the past year – the CPMs were very high and the ad quality was exceptional. The fill rate wasn’t all that great but overall it was a very impressive program. Looks like the program will probably go bye-bye, replaced with the lovely tiny text ads that only pay on a click or worse, an acquisition. 

Over time what this will mean is that RSS feeds might become cluttered just like Web sites and the quality of ads will be lowered. On a positive note, perhaps this will finally get us talking about my buck a feed concept!

Lastly, I wonder if this move will push some FB publishers away – could this be an ideal opportunity for another RSS play to make a move? Are you looking forward to AdSense in feeds?