Search Engine Journal

Yahoo Publisher Network Debuts RSS Feed Ads

Yahoo Publisher Network, which is in beta testing, has added RSS feed advertising, available for Wordpress and MovableType powered blogs, to its selection of site and blog monetization and publishing tools. For those of you who have not heard of Y!PN yet, its is bascially Yahoo Search Marketing’s answer to Google AdSense. I’ve been invited to test the program myself, have found it quite satisfactory, and will be issuing a review of the service in the future.

In order to activate the RSS feed advertising in the Yahoo Publisher Network admin, go to the Ad Setup area and select RSS Ad Layout. One must first register their RSS feed, and then generate the RSS ad code which is to be installed in the blog’s RSS template. I have not tested this part of Y!PN yet, but do understand that such implementation of contextual ads into RSS templates can be a bit tricky. Y!PN is offering a guide on doing so called the Ads in RSS Setup Guide, which is available on the ad setup page. I’m not sure how this implementation works with blogs that use Feedburner for RSS tracking. If you use Feedburner and have some insight on RSS Ad implementation and whether it works via FB service, please leave a comment below.

Personally I’m not very fond of RSS ads as a publisher because I’d rather have the end user visit the site, then be given a choice of ads.. especially if I’m running CPM based ads on the site along with pay-per-click contextual advertising such as Yahoo Pulisher Network or Google AdSense.

However, given the reality of not all users clicking over to the news generating site when they are skimming through news on web based aggregators like Google Reader or Bloglines, and the possibility of gaining an ad click from the user who would not click over to my blog, or the user who is perfectly happy with reading the RSS excerpt from a story, the notion of monetizing such syndictation is a good one. Additionally, I’ve also heard that RSS ads cut down on the amount of “splog” operators scraping and reprinting your feed excerpts (or full content feeds).