GOOGLE LAUNCHES INTO RSS AD PLACEMENT

Well, it wasn't prophetic or really insightful, but I did write a couple months ago in my AlwaysOn column:

I believe that within a few years, RSS advertising could divert a significant portion of the marketing dollars currently being pumped into banner and text ads.

I hope Google is building Adwords and Adsense to be integrated into the RSS universe, but can that company even capitalize on this? Google doesn't have the same control over RSS feeds as search terms, which makes me wonder whether this could become a longer tail of the advertising model? Think of an eBay world of RSS ad-space sellers and a market segmented into thousands (even millions) of content providers vying for advertising dollars. RSS could be the empowering force for "the little people" of the media and blogging worlds—an interesting scenario but one that might be too chaotic and impractical for the allocation of advertising dollars. In that case, will Google and others become RSS re-aggregators? It will be interesting to watch this story unfold.

FeedBurner is one of Google's partners in this new effort. Here is the post at their blog about it. More on this from Silicon Valley Watcher, Tom Foremski's blog that I recently stumbled across:

RSS feed management company Feedburner, which has been running an RSS advertising service from Overture since late 2004, was quick to announce its piggy-back support of Google's RSS Adsense. Feedburner promises "additional flexibility in determining frequency of ads, ability to prevent ads on short posts and other ad control mechanisms for your feed."

Steve Gillmor touches upon a matter I brought up above:

Now would also be a good time for Feedburner to follow through on Dick Costolo’s promises to address the ability for Feedburner users to reclaim their feeds if necessary. In fact, the inability of individual publishers to move their subscribers from one host to another is an RSS rights issue that needs to be solved.