we have seen how you can put AdSense on websites and blogs, and we’ve seen how you can use them on forums, a useful addition to a growing website. You can now also put AdSense in RSS feeds.

Google came late to this party. One of the few advantages offered by Yahoo’s Publisher Network was the ability to place contextualized ads in the posts that RSS pushed to users who preferred to pick up their content in a specialized reader instead of on a website. For publishers, that was always an option that brought serious benefits: although RSS subscriptions maintained audiences, those audiences weren’t seeing ads. Being able to deliver ads together with each RSS post then looked like the perfect solution.

And for some publishers AdSense in RSS has indeed turned out to be a valuable addition to their revenues. Professional blogger Darren Rowse has said that a full 10 percent of his AdSense earnings are generated through clicks on his RSS ads. That might suggest that Google’s delay in producing an AdSense for Feeds product gave them time to get it right. But it’s not as simple as that. The truth, in fact, might be that they took too long and turned up just as the train was leaving the station. Back in 2004, when RSS feeds started to take off, Bloglines dominated the market with its reader. The service appeared to have such potential that Ask Jeeves, now Ask.com, snapped the company up a year later for an undisclosed sum. Google too, quickly weighed in with its own reader and rapidly shot into first place.

By 2007, Google had a full 59 percent of a growing market and Bloglines was still in second place with just 33 percent. By 2010, that battle was over. Ask.com shut Bloglines down completely but the reason for the closure wasn’t the competition generated by Google’s reader. It was a change in the way people used the Internet. Announcing the end of Bloglines, Ask.com wrote on its blog: 

Instead of using their readers to find content they want to see, users are now relying on links placed on Facebook and recommendations made by the people they follow on Twitter. 

That decline could be seen in Darren Rowse’s figures. While an overall share of 10 percent of AdSense earnings isn’t bad especially when you’re a six figure blogger like Darren those figures were actually maintained by rising impressions, and there was a big difference between the eCPMs reported by his AdSense for Feeds units and those supplied by his AdSense for Content units.Worse, that gap was growing. While the content placed on Darren Rowse’s Web pages were becoming more valuable, the content sent through his RSS feeds was becoming less valuable. So does that mean AdSense publishers should tiptoe straight past the AdSense for Feeds product?

Not necessarily. RSS feeds might be in decline but they haven’t faded away completely. Some people do still read them. They do still enable publishers to hold on to readerships and bring visitors back to their sites and you’ll also want to use RSS to send automated headlines and links to Twitter and Facebook streams.

As long as some of your users are picking up your content in readers instead of on websites, you’ll want to make sure that they can see your ads. You just have to make sure that you optimize your ads in order get as much as you can out of that declining eCPM.

Read following articles are essential to complete this article.

1. Get Your RSS Feed Content Right
2. Formatting AdSense for RSS