AdSense for RSS and Atom feeds

Shuman Ghosemajumder announces on the Google Blog that AdSense now is supporting advertising in RSS and Atom feeds.

The idea is simple: advertisers have their ads placed in the most appropriate feed articles; publishers are paid for their original content; readers see relevant advertising - and in the long run, more quality feeds to choose from.

The key here is relevance. Advertising needs to be useful, interesting, and relevant to the reader. It's a challenging problem to match advertising to interested audiences using only the content of the feeds.

As I've said before, advertising in feeds isn't an obvious win. Excerpt-only feeds are already advertisements, advertisements of the full content of the article at the website. Layering ads on the ads will drive traffic away.

Those that do include the full-text of your articles in their feeds may find the feeds become the primary channel to some of their readers. In that case, advertising in that channel makes more sense.