Feedburner has confirmed that Google Adsense advertising is being integrated in Feedburner feeds and that should increase the income generated from feed advertising. The entry of Google Adsense in the lucrative, yet underutilized feed advertising space will surely increase advertiser competition to target your feed readers.
Our feed supports advertising by Feedburner Ad network program for over a year, and is even featured in the Feedburner Computing & Technology Channel. But inspite of over 15000 RSS feed readers, the money earned via feed advertising is very little. Its great that this news came in just when I had decided to remove these low paying ads.
The main cause of low earnings is that inspite of enabling ads on all articles, the ad fill rate is very poor and most articles have no ads. Getting high paying advertisers might be a problem here. Though high CPM rates ($7-$10 CPM) are common, it seems the daily budgets are limited and scattered over the huge feedburner network of publishers, the ad fill becomes poor even with the highest of daily budgets.
Adsense for feeds is not a new initiative though, and in fact it has been tested in 2005 earlier with limited success (and some of those signup links still work!). We had also applied then, but the queue was too long and were not accepted. Now Feedburner says AdSense for feeds will be released to a small group of publishers.
The great part about this news is that though the premium CPM ads will continue to be sold, there will be the added bonus of contextually targeted ads from Google Adsense that will fill up the remainder of their inventory! Now that should fill up all those empty ad spaces. There will be no problem of ad fill any longer as there is always the huge inventory of Google Adwords advertisers to fall upon.
Feedburner also lets you place Feedburner Network Ads on your website, and you can fall back upon Adsense ads in case of lack of ad fill. Now a complete integration of Feedburner and Adsense in feeds will let anyone place Google Adsense ads in their feeds and also let advertisers directly target your feed.
It will be interesting to watch the events unfold. I believe Google has taken a giant leap in feed advertising and will surely revolutionize the way in which you can earn money from your feeds.