Initial impressions of Google Adsense for feeds
I launched Adsense in my RSS feed on Saturday, May 28. The ads have now been present for a week. To date, I have not gotten one single clickthrough. In contrast, I get 5 clickthroughs per day with the ads on my web site. This earns about $1 per day and helps cover my web hosting fees. The clickthroughs generated come from search engine traffic. Google and Yahoo! are my number 1 and 2 referrers, respectively. I believe that some of these searchers visit the advertiser sites as a thank you for the content I provide. However, my regular readers view the journal content through feed readers much like an e-mail. That’s fine.
However, right now the sustainability of my site is entirely dependent on search engine traffic. I believe this is the case for most webloggers, with the exception of Jason Kottke. He managed to sign up micropatrons to support his efforts. However, this just isn’t practical for the rest of us, who aren’t professional bloggers. PayPal donations are not practical for most people either.
Google Adsense is a great support system for bloggers, but I am now skeptical of the feasibility of Adsense in RSS feeds. Here’s a recap of the good and bad:
The good
- Ad size is perfect. Not too large that it is unsightly but not so small that readers can’t see the ad text clearly.
- The code is easy to insert in a feed. Right now it works with Movable Type and Blogger.
- Relevance is on par with the web page equivalent.
- Ads appear properly in feed readers such as FeedDemon and NetNewsWire.
The bad
- Clickthrough ratio is very low. This might just be the case with my daily readers but I think it is a general problem.
- AdBlock works like a charm. I don’t even see the ads in Firefox.
- Relevance can still be improved. For example, I noticed “Christian Music Available” ads on my post about iPods.
- Readers will feel ad overload when looking at more than one post. This system will not work well for professional bloggers or people who post very frequently.
- The appearance of the ad is unsightly. The size is good but the text is pixelated. Google should use anti-aliasing and allow for color customization.
Recommendations
- Follow Google’s advice and only use the ads in full-text feeds.
- In Blogger and Movable Type, remember to deliver the code as
CDATA.
Questions
- Is the Page eCPM the same for RSS and HTML? I think this is determined by the keyword value and not the delivery mechanism, but Google might have a new algorithm for feeds.
- I’m not sure how impressions work on Bloglines or with conditional GET in general. I think Google has it figured out but I’m not positive.
I decided to remove the ads from my RSS feed. They are a bit unsightly and they failed to generate revenue.
