03 Nov 2003 | Brad Hurley said...

One potential fly in the ointment: I wonder if people who use Adsense on popular sites will be less willing to offer RSS feeds?

Since I've started using an RSS reader, I hit the actual pages of my "frequently visited" sites much less often, just scanning the RSS feed to see if there's anything I'm interested in reading further. So maybe an RSS feed might lead to a reduction in the number of page visits to a site, and thus a reduction in ad revenue? This of course assumes that Google doesn't count RSS reads as hits, which they shouldn't since their ads don't show up in the RSS feed.

03 Nov 2003 | Mike said...

On a related note, every time I go to Zeldy's site I click on the Speed Dating ads. Not that I'm looking for a supersonic dating experience, but just to show my support :)

03 Nov 2003 | Matt Haughey said...

I thought about the RSS thing to, but my pvrblog was never about making money, it just sort of happened, so I kept full posts in RSS. I don't think daily readers are the biggest users of the ads, I would suspect that people searching for info would be much more likely to click on related ads (I do when I'm looking for something). I could imagine people looking to make money as a primary objective offering only excerpts to drive you to their site, or potentially working ad systems into RSS (maybe the first item could be an ad related to the remaining posts?), but people should respect their readers and just give them what they want (full RSS posts that let you bypass websites).

As for those speed dating ads, those aren't really ads per se, they're a company that is attempting to boost their google ranking by paying zeldman to link to them several times with different keyword phrases. They don't care if any human ever sees them or follows them, it's all about pleasing the googlebot. I've been asked several times by spam/marketing companies to do the same and refused on principle. It's one company paying someone with a high google rank to help them game google results. A sort of new version of link farming.

03 Nov 2003 | Brad Hurley said...

Hmmm, I didn't realize that Google was paying on the basis of click-throughs; I mistakenly thought it was based on page views. It's kind of amazing to me that so many people clicked through ads on your site...in all my years of using the Internet, I've never once intentionally clicked on an ad, but I guess I must be in the minority.

Back to the RSS issue: my point is that even though someone may not set up a blog as a money-making venture, once they start generating revenue from the Google ads they would start viewing the blog as a source of income. And once that happens, they might want to protect/augment the revenue stream by discouraging people from bypassing the site through RSS -- at the very least I would think they'd be less willing to offer full posts.

But it won't be long before ads start showing up regularly in RSS feeds anyway...I've already noticed ads in InfoWorld's RSS feeds, among others.

03 Nov 2003 | Jon Gales said...

"in all my years of using the Internet, I've never once intentionally clicked on an ad, but I guess I must be in the minority." - Brad

You're just lucky some others have taken up the slack :). I get a really good CTR, but I think that has more to do with Google's ad engine than my readers. When I do a story on a new Samsung phone, ads show up within a few minutes for Samsung accessories, good deals on the phone and the like. Works like a charm.

Re: RSS... I think it does change things. I like my visitors to view the main site for a few reasons. First, I reference images a lot, and depending on the reader they may not see them in the right place (I live by right align). Second, I have a plug-in that offers links to related stories which helps put things in context. And lastly the ads.

The RSS feed I run still has the first 30 words or so (may be 45), so you can get a feel for the story without any trouble. If you want more info, click through. If not, no sweat.

12 Dec 2003 | Casino said...

Google adsense is a great means of publicity.Can we use adsense for even Blog sites?