Google Ads have started appearing in select RSS feeds on a trial basis.  This has been long anticipated, is a completely logical extension of Google AdSense, and - while some people may fight ads in RSS – it’s an inevitable part of the RSS ecosystem. 

Feedburner announced today that they support Google AdSense in feeds.  Feedburner already supports Yahoo! Search Marketing (fka Overture Advertising) and Amazon Associates as part of their “commerce services” – it was straightforward for Feedburner to incorporate Google AdSense into this.  While the publisher (e.g. you, me) needs to set up Google AdSense and be invited into their Google AdSense for RSS program, once your Google AdSense ID is approved for RSS, you will be able to immediately turn this capability on in Feedburner with minimal configuration.

As Dick Costolo - the CEO of Feedburner – mentioned in a post about the financing round we led, Feedburner’s core competency is managing complexity with regard to RSS feed management.  While setting up Google Ads on a web site is pretty straightforward (but still requires some technical understanding), it gets a lot harder to modify your RSS feed to include Google Ads.  Feedburner makes it simple, lets you have more flexibility (e.g ad frequency, category optimization, ad formatting), and handles all the weird issues that Feedburner has learned about my managing a large number of feeds (e.g. feed read/unread problems when you insert ads, ad formatting in different RSS aggregators).

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