What with all the coverage we've been giving to RSS advertising as it might exist, it's only right that we give some time to what's currently available as an option. Darren Rowse has put up a nice, concise list of what kind of things you can choose from if you're looking to put ads in your RSS feeds.

[via The Blog Herald]

While I didn't have the opportunity to actually talk to anyone from the company, Newsgator founder Greg Reinacker has put up a post on his blog that deals with the brief appearance of AdSense ads within Newsgator Online that we reported last Friday. Reinacker explains that the ads only began showing up because someone mistakenly flipped a switch but that ads within NGO were coming at some point in the future as part of a larger stable of changes and updates to the free product. He also reassures those with concerns about the ads' display, such as Weblogs Inc CEO Jason Calacanis, that Newsgator is committed to play nicely on the 'net playground and respect everyone else's content.

So that's the end of the story, at least for now. The monetization of free online RSS readers has been brought up before and is sure to be a major point of discussion in the future. As always, stay tuned to AdJab for the latest and greatest.

[Update: Jason comments once again on the issues surrounding this as well as some ways to alleviate publisher's problems with ads within RSS readers.]

OK, we've taken a deep breath after the excitement of last week's news that online RSS reader Newsgator seemed to have added contextual AdSense ads that would appear next to some blog posts. From what I've heard, this was an early release of a planned offering that was pulled because of "formatting" issues. That differed from what Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs, Inc heard, which is that this was a mistake and nothing like this is planned.

In the meantime, Jason takes on the issue of advertising being placed by a third-party next to Weblogs, Inc. feeds. He makes it clear that Newsgator is not stealing the WIN content but also makes it clear that putting competitive ads in the full-text feeds is not cool and he will explore options to deal with that happening.

As I've mentioned, I'll be speaking to someone from Newsgator about this tomorrow and will have more details then.

Just in the last half-hour or so I've noticed Google AdSense ads have begun appearing with my Newsgator Online feeds. The way it seems to be appearing is a series of AdSense ads are showing up to the right of the feed list. You can see what I'm talking about here. I've been told by a Newsgator spokesperson that this was a test that has since - or shortly will be - taken down. But it will be coming back up next week.

[UPDATE] Straight from Weblogs Inc. CEO Jason Calacanis: "I just spoke to newsgator. They claim it was a mistake and they are sorry."

[OTHER UPDATE] I'll be speaking with someone from Newsgator about this next Tuesday and will bring you all up to speed after that happens.

Click the jump to see a screenshot.

Last week I kind of tore into an AdAge story that made old-media thinking marketers feel warm and comfortable by basically saying it was too early to invest any serious time investigating new media strategies and spending. Now the reading public has spoken and have said emphatically that media planners and buyers need to look at blogs, podcasts and RSS now. While there are still some who disagree, the vast majority think now is the time to be investing in those new media, even if adoption and use of those technologies hasn't yet reached critical mass. The focus, as always, needs to be on striking the right balance. That comes with hard work and investigation as to how each specific segment of the audience is using media and can't rely on over-generalized surveys.

AOL has decided that it should focus on search ads, somewhat like Google does, instead of prolonging the inevitable crash due to the massive flocking to broadband its customer will do. AOL is the world's largest and most well-known Internet service provider (ISP) and is now realizing that it takes something different than millions of dial-up users to remain successful in today's wizz-bang fast-paced business world. AOL's focus on ad-based revenue is a necessary reinvention of a classic American brand. Unfortunately, this means about 5000 people will loose their jobs. Despite the layoffs, AOL is doing what they think is needed to remain competitive (not that this is any consolation to former employees). Look for AOL's coming services in the advertising venue, possibly to consist of some type of ad network to mirror Google's AdSense and Microsoft's AdCenter. AOL already has a partnership with Google for some of its advertising, but many analysts are thinking AOL will come out with its own.

[note: Weblogs, Inc. is a stand-alone subsidiary of America Online.]

Reuters news service is eliminating subscription fees for receiving its content on mobile devices and switching to an ad-supported model. Mobile.Reuters.com will feature a number of categories with RSS feeds for them all. Those categories will provide advertisers with an opportunity to sponsor a specific category as well as other placements. The initial advertiser is Hewlett-Packard, who will be running ads for a new color printer both. Ads for HP will run both on the site in the form of banner ads as well as within the RSS feeds. Reuters is touting this as a way they can begin making money "today" as well as in the long term.

RSS feed creation service Feedburner is moving beyond the feed alone and launching a new service that will deliver ads on the websites themselves. The service will use the feed technology to place ads in parts of the page that are dynamic and updated. Advertisers will be a able to specify when their ads will appear and if they want they want their ads to appear on posts that get a lot of comments. Imagine how ads now appear within feeds, usually showing up at the bottom of the post content. This service will do basically the same thing for the posts on the blog or website itself. By placing ads on spots not previously occupied by advertising, marketers are moving beyond traditional spots such as the top of the page or the right or left hand navigation bars. It also delivers those ads to the blog's entire audience, both those who read via RSS and those who manually visit the site each day.

Yesterday I mentioned RSS feed creation service FeedBurner had launched a self-service management tool for advertisers to insert their ads into RSS feeds. Well today brings news that similar company Pheedo is about to announce the launch of "Ads for Feeds," a new service that will make it easy for website publishers to insert and track the ads into their feeds. Ads for Feeds will provide a bit of code that publishers can copy and paste into their blogging platform template, with the basic version providing some basic stats and a more expensive version giving up more data. This is Pheedo's big push to grab the publsher market in the emerging RSS advertising space, according to president Bill Flitter.

As part of its effort to make RSS-feed ad-buying as simple as possible for marketers, FeedBurner has created a self-service tool that allows ad-buyers and planners to easily make their messages and campaigns available for feed insertion. The new service allows for self-directed media purchasing that bypasses needing to talk to one of those pesky human beings. Final veto over whether an ad is placed in a publisher's feed still lies with that publisher, but FeedBurner makes it pretty easy to find a publisher and tailor an ad so it fits nicely. In the post on their blog, the FeedBurner team hints at this being just one more step toward a full suite of products and functionality that will be unveiled in three or four months.

While ad spending on new media technologies such as blogs, podcasts and RSS is still relatively small in absolute dollars, the growth in those areas over the next few years is expected to be huge. The three sectors combined only brought in about $20 million in ad revenue in 2004 but then grew by close to 200 percent in 2005 and is expected to leap another 144 percent in 2006. Podcast advertising is seen as taking up a good chunk of that growth, growing from $3 million in 2005 to a projected $300 million in 2010. The most attractive aspect of all this user-generated content is the demographic that consumes it. The audience for blogs, podcasts and RSS is seen as being relatively well off, young and mobile. Engaging and reaching that group is increasingly important for advertisers who are seeing traditional outlets like newspapers and TV be less attractive options for that audience.

CNET has begun publishing banner ads that have RSS feeds embedded in them that allow advertisers to run scrolling headlines in the ads or provide other automatic updates. The ads will appear on 15 of the CNET sites and began appearing last Friday. The first advertiser to sign on was the E! Entertainment Network. The E! ad featured "E! News" headlines that, when clicked, took the visitor directly to that story. As MarketingVox states, that sort of scrolling feature could be used in a number of ways for different retailers or information sites

Subtitle: Even If People Don't Quite Know What It Is

This study that shows just how valuable RSS might eventually be as an alternate advertising delivery method from email shouldn't come as a surprise to those who have been tracking the technology for a while now. The advantages of RSS in terms of sending ads are many. First, an ad doesn't get lumped in with all the other spam that hits most email in-boxes. Secondly, users have to make a conscious choice to receive the RSS feed, which makes them highly motivated potential consumers. That's a group advertisers are (or at least should) always be on the lookout for so getting them to sign on would be a boon to the company being advertised.

A retail site named eBags chose to incorporate RSS into their shopping site for just those reasons. On a product the consumer is interested in there's a one-click button to get RSS alerts for My Yahoo! (and hopefully other services soon) that will send updates on pricing, promotions and availability to the consumer. Other companies are doing likewise despite a still low number of people aware of the technology. In fact, thanks to things like My Yahoo!, most RSS users are unaware that that's what they're using.

Pheedo CEO Bill Flitter has put up the third and final installment in his series of tips for advertising within RSS feeds. Flitter gets to the heart of what makes RSS such an attractive - and potentially lucrative - ad medium when he points out that this is information the end user is opting in to receive.  They have sought out that feed and are gaining value from it. So ads within those feeds have the potential to reach a very select and highly influential audience. He also makes a point similar to what Feedburner's Dick Costello said in that sending ads based on contextual relevance may not be the best idea. Instead it's much better to target by demographic information. Not only does that allow for a wider range of ads and advertisers but it's more likely to result in a sale. You can read parts one and two of Flitter's commentary here and here respectively.

Feedburner CEO Dick Costello has given a bit of insight as to how contextual advertising within RSS feeds differs from the practice on the internet, either via search or just on a publisher page. When a person is doing a search or reading a site on a particular topic then ads on that topic are likely to spur on behavior such as buying. But when a person is reading the RSS feed on a topic they're not looking to buy, they're just looking for more information. So ads in that feed are more likely to be targeted at the demographics of the audience such as age or income. That's an interesting shift in focus depending on the method of information delivery.