Yahoo! has discontinued its Ads in RSS service, which enabled network publishers to insert contextual advertising into syndicated content and get a piece of the action thanks to a revenue-sharing program.
This is the e-mail that was sent out to the network members:
Dear Yahoo! publishing partner,
We wanted to let you know that we are closing our Ads in RSS program effective February 2, 2009. We have ended this beta program to focus on other more broadly used ad products for our publishing partners, such as Sponsored Search and Content Match. We recommend that you remove current Content Match tags from your RSS pages.
Please be assured that we continue to invest in both our Sponsored Search and Content Match products and are excited about many upcoming improvements for 2009. We appreciate our relationship with you and look forward to working with you to grow our business together.
Sincerely,
Your partners at Yahoo!
Yahoo refers to Ads in RSS as a beta program, but it was launched quite a while ago; it was formally introduced in November 2005.
Now that Yahoo is pulling out of the RSS advertising space, Pheedo, Text Links Ads’ Feedvertising and Google’s FeedBurner (which isn’t exactly delivering stellar performance lately) are just about the only ones left.
(Thanks to Dave Zatz for the tip)
go Pheedo!
I believe Google is still also providing AdSense for feeds, which I think is separate from FeedBurner (or at least it’s managed through AdSense:
https://www.goo...py?answer=20012
They are one in the same product now.
In some respects, I can’t blame them. The ordinary citizen doesn’t know what RSS even is, let alone how to use it. College student’s I’ve taught web design classes to didn’t even know what RSS was (granted it was like web design 101for dummies). I myself didn’t even really start using RSS until about 8 months ago, and I’m a professional web developer. People just don’t understand the benefit of saving time by subscribing.
I’ve always maintained that RSS is a bad technology, as it allows users to grab content off of a website, without having to visit the website or view ads, the vast major of the time. This is good for the user, but bad for any website that is trying to earn money. It is also bad for advertisers as essential they are paying a company, and no one is seeing their ads. The internet needs to move away from the open source mental attitude that everything should be, as in beer (which, by the way, I have never see beer for free. So if anyone can point me to free beer, I’ll gladly retract these comments.)
I agree DieFatty, the RSS system does seem unfair to websites. Yes the website can reach more users who wouldn’t visit the website unless they read it through Google Reader first, but it is a huge liability to allow access to your content without having them come to their site. And I don’t just mean advertisements, but so much effort goes into creating a site works a certain way, whether it is to funnel users to a product or get them engaged in other articles, that websites are ultimately discouraged to push RSS feeds.
>> The internet needs to move away from the open source mental attitude
Uh… Open source works precisely because it is free.
Without open source the internet would not exist as we know it today.
Imagine the world we would live in without Java or open source software. People would still be using vb6 to pump out HTML2 pages in IIS. You’re certainly not going to get any innovation from a monopoly.
Nearly all successful web sites run on open source software.
The fact is that anarchist mutual aid (i.e. cooperative capitalism) is the most efficient economic model known to man, and the tens of trillions of dollars of value that has been created by open source software (despite the fact that Amerika is a communist dictatorship) proves that point.
Fact 1: RSS brings more revenue in to web sites that use it.
Fact 2: You get free beer all the time. All of human culture is nothing but one big free lunch. You didn’t invent the car, the telephone, the microprocessor, language, writing, but everyone in society benefits because someone did.
Perhaps you should study economics and information theory and stop being a fascist.
Thats kind of odd that they’d kill a revenue generating service.
Yahoo seem to be doing a lot of odd revenue-killing things recently.
E.g.
http://www.seob...ost-their-minds
Well, probably they weren’t making any money out of it, hence why they closed it down
“Thats kind of odd that they’d kill a revenue generating service.”
Well we don’t know if it was making any money and we don’t know what it costs to develop and maintain. The couple times I experimented with CPC RSS advertising over the years, I got relatively few clicks and pissed off readers. So I’d rather keep the feed clean. Bet there are others like me.
@antje wilsch. Thank you! We are plugging away and finding success with our model.
This is interesting. I think yahoo may be thinking that RSS feeds need to serve more of a specific purpose like information flow within organizations rather than a way to advertise to the general public.
I think that unless a feed is full text advertising in RSS feeds offers a poor rate of return.
I’ve taken full-text RSS feeds and put them into an easy to read newspaper format (with Feedjournal.com application) and created a custom content newspaper which includes this blog.
Check it out: http://www.Libe...tynewsprint.com
That’s an interesting context
OMG
That site hurtz my eyes
Yahoo is one of the worst ad serving companies in the industry, just like they are terrible at monetizing search queries.
Agreed, and their publisher program is a J O K E
And you know this because what? You work for either Yahoo, Google, or another ad-tech company of any size?
Jackass.
That’s too bad. Competition is great for consumers and for future innovation.
As a side note, for publishers that have feeds, BlastCasta has a pretty cool feed subscription widget at http://www.blas...eed-widget.aspx
The widget lets your readers combine, filter, sort, and even translate a feed.
Again, Yahoo is a dying star but in the end, it might be good if they know where and how to focus their advertising program to develop a decent system for publishers/advertisers comparing to AdWords/AdSense.
Oh Google, I love you, you’re so hot and successful, please please won’t you let me suck your …
Fanboy, you are one pathetic motherfucker, as are your tribe of dayjob bozos at no-name startups, providing endless critique of a company they know shit-all about.
Retard.
Interesting news from Yahoo because we see no let up from publishers and continue to hit ROI marks for advertisers when we run Pulse 360 sponsored links on our RSS publisher partners.