It turns out that I was mistaken the other day when I mentioned that I had spotted ads in my PubSub feed. While there are ads in the feed, they aren’t from PubSub, they are part of the original RSS feed that PubSub had picked up on, in this case it was from Freshmeat.

This raises an interesting issue for PubSub, if they decide to show ads in their feeds (why not, most everyone else will start doing it), how am I as a regular user supposed to be to tell the difference between an ad placed by them and one that was part of the original data (in this case an RSS entry)? They could certainly include some formatting that would make it obvious, but then that would also allow feed readers to also easily distinguish the ad from the data and hide the ad. Just more to think about when it comes to ads in feeds.

It looks the days of most feeds having no ads are quickly coming to a close. I just noticed Google AdSense ads in the feed from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW). As has already been noted, Google been letting a few sites test out this new feature recently. When Google turns on this feature for all AdSense users I expect the flood gates will be thrown open and feeds without ads will quickly become the minority. Just this week I’ve gone from one of the 80+ feeds that I read having ads to four. I don’t know how long Google is going leave this feature in the testing phase, but I’d expect that by the end of May ad free feeds will become pretty rare.

When you combine the idea of Google allowing ads in feeds and their purchase of Urchin you end up with a strong FeedBurner competitor.

UPDATE 5:00pm 27 Apr 2005: Now my PubSub feed has AdSense ads.

I started thinking that the ads in Slashdot feeds I noticed yesterday may have just been a fluke since they disappeared as suddenly as they showed up yesterday. After looking at the Slashdot feed in Bloglines this morning though, it appears that the ads only show up in specific entries. It isn’t clear how they are determining which entries should have ads, but it is clear that at this point there are not ads for each entry.

So I copied the URL for the one ad I came across this morning on the story about iTunes coming to Australia. It was run through feedstermedia which in turn ran it through DoubleClick which then pointed to page on Sun‘s website (which is what the the ad was advertising).

If you go to the feedstermedia.com website you’ll see there isn’t really much there. They appear to running phpAdsNew manage the feed ads. The only other interesting tidbit was that in addition to Slashdot, Freshmeat and SourceForge also have some data there. Which points us to the Open Source Technology Group (OSTG); which owns Slashdot, Freshmeat and SourceForge. None of this is really surprising, just interesting. It looks like there may come a time when every website run by OSTG will have ads in their feeds.

The general idea of ads in feeds appears to be ready to explode, with Google AdSense testing them out. Talk about timing.

UPDATE 1:30pm 27 Apr 2005: I’m now getting ads in the Freshmeat feed that I subscribe to.

Advertising on the web is more or less an accepted fact of life. Things have to get paid for some how and often that “how” is via advertising (at least in part). With more and more content being viewed via feeds (RSS & Atom) the advertising discussion has been focusing more on how to advertise in feeds in addition to websites. The debate over advertising in feeds is going along in much the same way that advertising on websites did.

At first there was something of a backlash to sites with advertising, that they had some how sold out and should be shunned. Gradually this attitude has drifted away, with only those who really want to avoid ads still making use of browser plugins or proxy servers that filter out ads. It is still fairly early in feed advertising game and we are still in the backlash stage. Most feeds (at least the ones I read) don’t have advertising, but there are some. Those who are doing it (like Russell) often use FeedBurner to insert ads.

That seems to have changed now. Slashdot, the old man of geek sites, has started including ads in their feeds. With more than 30,000 people subscribed to Slashdot on Bloglines, the number of people exposed to feed advertising is going to increase significantly. This will likely increase the heat in the debate over advertising in feeds. In the end I believe that ads in feeds will become less of an issue and more of an accepted norm for most people.

Much of the discussion about ads in feeds will continue to focus on how to do it. For websites Google AdSense pretty much rules the market. This is a rather unfortunate situation, I’d like to see more competition in this area. There is the possibility that Yahoo! Publisher Network will provide this, but so far this isn’t an available option the same way that AdSense is. So that seems to leave most of us with FeedBurner as the only serious option for feed advertising. I don’t think that will be the case in the long term. In the long term I suspect that FeedBurner will get absorbed by someone else with much deeper pockets. Although the likely targets might seem to be Google (combined with AdSense) or Yahoo! (combined with their Publisher Network), I don’t think it will be either one. Although both Google and Yahoo! should make feed ads an option in using their services.

I think the mostly likely buyer is someone much closer to the feed end of the equation. I’m thinking of Bloglines (now owned by Jeeves) as one of the most likely to buy out FeedBurner. This would actually give Bloglines a business model (which so far seems to consist of simply selling out to someone else) and would be a good fit for FeedBurner because Bloglines already gets the idea of feeds and how they work. I’m not going to bet money on it, but this is where my gut says FeedBurner should be.

Speaking of Bloglines, I never did get my I love Bloglines shirt.

UPDATE 3:20pm 26 Apr 2005: I’m not getting the ads in the Slashdot feed that I read via Bloglines anymore. Perhaps this was just an experiment?

Now I know why I couldn’t login to Bloglines last night.