What are Blog Feed Ads?:
Your blog's RSS feed is valuable advertising space that you can make money from by placing ads within it. When your blog subscribers receive your blog's feed via their preferred feed readers or via email, they see your full or partial blog posts (depending on whether your feed is setup as a full or partial feed), but no ads appear within that feed. Subscribers who read your blog content without actually visiting your blog don't see the ads on your blog. That means you won't make money from the impression-based ads or pay-per-click ads on your blog because subscribers won't see them or click on them. That's lost revenue to you.
There is another option available to you. You can monetize your blog's feed with feed ads. There are a number of popular advertising networks and sources that make it extremely easy to place ads in your blog's feed including Google AdSense and Pheedo. Most feed ads pay you on a pay-per-click basis, and some allow you to choose the type of ads that display in your blog's feed, such as text ads or image ads, as well as the placement. You might even be able to customize colors to match the color palette you use in your blog's feed.
The Positives of Publishing Blog Feed Ads:
As described above, many people who subscribe to blog feeds never visit the live blogs to read the content published on them. If you provide subscribers a full feed, you are likely to be losing ad revenue simply because you're losing page views. When people don't see or click on ads published on your blog, you don't make money from those ads. Therefore, including ads in your blog's feed can offset that lost revenue.
The Negatives of Publishing Blog Feed Ads:
Blog feed ads could be a great revenue-generator, but there are negatives that you need to be aware of before you begin publishing them in your own blog feed. For example, feed ads can clutter your blog content within the RSS feed. They can also annoy and frustrate subscribers who have to scroll through ads to get to the real content that they want and that they took the time to subscribe to receive in their feed readers or email.
Finally, if feed ads are irrelevant or inappropriate to your subscriber audience, they might unsubscribe from your feed altogether, and they might stop visiting your blog, too. It's one thing for people not to click on an ad thereby reducing your income potential but it's another thing entirely for people to unsubscribe from your blog feed and refuse to visit your blog again because of ads that appear in your blog's feed. Neither is a good outcome, but the latter could be disastrous to your long-term blogging goals if the loss of subscribers is large.
Bottom-line about Blog Feed Ads
If you decide to try blog feed ads, be sure to monitor those ads within your feed to ensure they're relevant to your blog topic and appropriate for your blog's audience. You don't want to offend your subscribers with irrelevant or inappropriate ads. Be sure to monitor your subscriber numbers, too. If you see a sudden drop in subscribers after you begin publishing feed ads, you might want to rethink your strategy by deciding which is more important to you: higher subscriber numbers or potential income from feed ads shown to a smaller subscriber audience? Only you can make that decision based on your blogging goals.
