8 Easy Ways to Monetize Your RSS Feed
RSS Feeds are a powerful internet marketing tool that’s taken on several variants. Amazon.com uses feeds to help users keep track of bestseller releases. Wordpress.org uses feeds to deliver news on the latest Wordpress developments.
Websites like AbsurdlyCool.com uses feeds to distribute information about freebies and coupons. ReviewMe uses blog feeds to give advertisers a snapshot glimpse of publisher content and most affiliate companies offer RSS feeds for promotional use.
For bloggers, a RSS feed is mainly a content delivery and syndication system that allows readers to have access to your content without visiting your website.
While a blog feed’s malleability and search engine friendly structure leads to additional site visibility and traffic, it also has the effect of seducing readers away from your website.
This limits your website’s full monetization potential because a portion of your visitors will connect with your website in their feed reader and thus avoid the arsenal of contextual or impression-based ads you’ve carefully optimized alongside your content.
Some Solutions to the Problem
Feed advertising is a way of monetizing the community of readers who primarily follow your content through RSS feeds. In my opinion, there are three main ways to monetize your feed.
- Manually include affiliate text or image links - Easiest way to get started. High likelihood for conversions if implemented contextually.
- Private Ad Deals - Negotiate personally with advertisers and sell ad spots in your feed. Can be tiresome.
- Advertising Programs for Feeds - Hassle-free method that ensures ad-rotation and uniqueness. A moderate number of subscribers is usually a publisher requirement.
Dosh Dosh’s Collection of Feed Advertising Networks
Here’s a current list of advertising networks which provide feed monetization options. Some like Feedburner offer category based (E.G. Internet, Business, Sports) advertising for your blog feed but others like Yahoo Publisher Networks offers contextual ads that are based on feed content.
Others like Q-Ads allow you designate ads base on specific keywords and programs like ThankYouPages allow to make money from interstitial ads which show up between your feed and its outgoing link destinations.
I’m quite sure that I missed out some networks, so please leave a comment if you know of any that should be included.
TARGETED CATEGORY-BASED ADVERTISING
Feedburner Advertising Network
Participation in FAN is by invitation, based on a variety of variables such as how long FeedBurner has managed your feed, your subscribership size and consistency, and frequency of content publication
Type of Ads: Text Ad, Text Ad with Logo, Banner | Rates: CPM
Feedvertising (Text Link Ads)
Allows you to run text link ads in your RSS feed. Apart from the Feedvertising ads, you can also choose to run your own in-house ads or affiliate links.
Type of Ads: Text links. No banner or buttons. | Rates: Flat rate pricing.
Pheedo’s FeedPoweredâ„¢ advertising platform converts your RSS feeds into rich, dynamically updating advertising that engages your audience…Pheedo retrieves your RSS feed several times an hour and updates your FeedPowered advertisements with any newly published items.
Type of Ads: Text, Logo & Text and Banner | Rates: CPC
CONTEXTUAL FEED ADVERTISING
Participants of the program must have a valid U.S. Social Security or Tax ID number, and web site content that is predominantly in English and targeted at a U.S. user base. Yahoo! will contact you about your eligibility to participate and about availability of the program.
Type of Ads: Text links | Rates: CPC
Through BrightAds RSS, Kanoodle’s content-targeted sponsored links will be inserted directly into site owners’ RSS feeds within posts or as individual posts, with relevancy of the ads assured through Kanoodle’s topic-based approach.
Type of Ads: Contextual Text links. | Rates: CPC.
KEYWORD BASED ADVERTISING
MediaFed
Our ad placement system automatically inserts adverts into your feeds in one of two ways: Adverts are inserted every x articles where you control the value of x. Or by matching keywords to your article contents to target relevant advertising.
(Note: I’m not entirely sure if MediaFed is still currently offering RSS advertising.)
Type of Ads: Banners | Rates: Unknown
Q-Ads is an advertising network that frees writers from traditional constraints in advertising. Q-Ads delivers relevant advertising, based on user defined keywords, as image based text ads that can then be used on websites, in blog posts, and in RSS feeds.
Type of Ads: Text & Video Ads | Rates: CPC
INTERSTITIAL FEED ADVERTISING
ThankYouPages
RSS Interstitials that allows publishers to insert advertising into the links contained within their RSS feeds. When a user clicks a link from your RSS feed, they will are shown a short, fully branded, interstitial advertisement between the click of the link, and the final destination.
Type of Ads: Full page interstitials | Rates: CPM and CPC
RSS is a new but major aspect to internet business. Thanks for this information on making money with it!
Nice post, there’s a few networks there that I’ve never heard of. Thanks
Those interstitial pages sound like a great idea if your goal is to annoy readers to the point of unsubscribing to your feed.
I’ve seem some feeds which incorporate Google ads into the articles, but I suppose this would only work if the subscriber’s client supported JavaScript.
Thats a great bunch of good sites you can use.But which one to use is the main thing.Too much of adds clutter the posts on feed.Putting one ad will be more effective as far as I understand.I don’t want to annoy the readers who subscribe to feed to avoid those ads
Im sure were going to see more and more feed advertising networks in the future as RSS takes off.
I use Feedburners FAN and have made very little. Hopefully this will pick up
Ads are like ants. they will find a way into any picnic basket.
The feed ads will happen… it’s just a matter of volume and critical mass… nothing is free.
Isn’t it possible to do it yourself with a plugin?
Hi Kaj
Yes.. it’s possible to do it yourself with a plugin. However, the ad networks provide a lot of ready advertisers and convenience for publishers. Think of it as something like Adsense, but for feeds.
If you’re interested in learning more about DIY advertising, please read my latest series of articles on direct advertising..
Hi Maki,
Thanks for the answer. Do you use in your advertisements rates for a month or on clicks?
For DIY advertising (i.e advertising without a middleman or ad network), I recommend using time-based rates, which can be divided into months or weeks. A monthly ad rate would make things a lot easier.
Ad rates based on clicks might not be beneficial for the blogger when he or she doesn’t have much traffic. There’s also a need to monitor clicks which is an additional hassle.
I already thought so.
Is an text advertisement like just the name of a company with link to it possibly?
Great topics. thanks
Yes, Kaj.. a text ad with just the name of the company with a link is possible
But does company’swant that? And when should I contact a company to ask if they want a advertisement link on my blog?