Making Money With RSS

[andrewteman]

How do people generally feel about monetizing their RSS feeds through advertising? It seems so far that the only real methods of doing so involve insertion of ads (AdSense etc) every nth item in a feed.

Been thinking about some more creative ways to help publishers to monetize RSS traffic, and was curious what the overall general feeling was in terms of throwing ads into your feeds.

Does anyone do it? If so, how has it performed? If you don't advertise in your feeds, why not? Any just general thoughts on the topic?

Very curious...

[biggles338]

I'm investigating the same thing - applied to google adsense for feeds but so far no reply. I can't think of any reason to not try and get some revenue from what i am doing anyway.
I have noticed that google adsense has managed to do what nobody did before - make advertising on webpages an expected thing.

[andrewteman]

What kind of traffic do you see from your feeds? Do you track readership through feedburner or anything like that?

[JJao]

You could create a subscription based RSS feed service, place mp3s behind the links, and call it "Podcasting". Managers and marketeers love these buzzwords!

Oh wait, you asked something else. Sorry.

[andrewteman]

Ha...I agree...we do love them! Podcasting is nothing more than Mp3's for the most part...funny how these buzzwords get out of hand so fast.

[JJao]

Yeah. I happen to know a VJ a bit (creates nice and hip audio and video himself, going online soon), he does it too. Either because a) he has no clue, b) reminds him of a certain computer brand with a tree fruit name (TOS) or c) the reason above.

Back ontopic though... I think about adding a RSS feed to my site within a few months, but I have even been doubtful about doing that for quite a while. The context is relevant here though, this is a personal, non-commercial site and I don't depend on any income at all.
Would I consider using ads from others in my feeds? No, I don't think so, because of the possible downside on user experience. (Is it easy for users to distinguish between content and ads for example? I wouldn't know). I like the more established methods of advertisement so users know what's going on (before they click), not risking people feeling being tricked into visiting an unexpected website.

But in a commercial environment, it might be a different story of course...

[Brain1965]

Hi, I just had the same ideas about monetizing my websites feed. I was previously using regular statistics plus feedburner to view click throughs etc. Amazingly enough, alot of people have added my feed, and since then, my websites traffic has increased too.

I am now using OrangeFeed to monetize my feed. The thing I like best is that I can choose how frequent the ads are displayed. I can't say I'm rolling in dough now, but atleast it pays for the website, and I haven't had any complaints from readers (so far).