AdSense For Feeds (make more money from google?)

Ever since google bought Feedburner they have been working towards placing AdSense on the Feedburner feeds. No surprise there as Mr. G needs to keep growing and Adsense/Adwords is what feeds the beast. A few months back Feedburner made Adsense available and I attempted to try it but for what ever reason it didn’t work.

Long story short – a few days ago I noticed a new link on my Adsense Overview page which is entitled Adsense for Feeds. Of course it may have been there for a while and I just didn’t notice it until now. Needless to say I clicked the “Get Started” button. To no surprise it told me that I had no feeds in my account and gave me a link to “View our Account Migration Guide”. Apparently you will have to have Google migrate all your feeds from Feedburner to Adsense. Turns out this isn’t complicated. In fact Google will do it for you. This is right up my alley – anytime I can get someone else to do the tech stuff suits me just fine. Just ask Google. So I did and am waiting to see what happens next.

Now I’m telling all you folks this because should things work out, all feed subscribers will be screaming and nashing their teeth as soon as the Adsense ads start appearing on feeds. Before you all hit the unsubscribe button hear me out.

This whole Adsense for Feeds thing has me more than curious as it just doesn’t fit in with Google’s current policies. How are they going to assure quality clicks for the Advertisers? At present they frown on too many clicks coming from the same IP. One of the things you have to be careful of is that some of your readers may try and help you by clicking your ads repeatedly. This doesn’t help at all and can get your account banned. Clicks have to be natural and repeated clicks from the same IP is not natural.

However, if I have Adsense on my Feeds then I am only going to get clicks from my readers and consequently make money from it. Search traffic will not see these ads. Presumably Mr. G wants readers to click the ads – if not then why offer the service. So does this mean that they won’t mind the same people clicking ads on a more frequent basis? They can hardly penalize us for repeated clicks when our pool of readers is limited. This, in a nutshell, is what I want to find out. In one sense readers are highly targeted for keywords and Google likes that. I suppose they feel this will benefit the Advertisers – maybe it will. On the other hand this just seems ripe for abuse and I am curious as to how Mr. G plans on counting clicks. Which will they consider valid and which will be considered suspect?

So before un-subscribing your ass off when the ads appear, do re-consider. I am curious to see how this program is going to be monitored by Google. I will certainly keep you updated of my findings. I should also say that this is not a call to entice you to click those ads. Please, please, please… don’t unless it is something you really are interested in. I have no wish to game Adsense in any way and you shouldn’t either. I suspect that some readers will ignore them in the same way they ignore the ads on some blogs – just background noise that bloggers tend not to notice. I understand why search traffic clicks ads – I don’t understand why targeted feed subscribers ever would though. And I don’t understand why Google thinks they would either.

And so, let me see what this little experiment will lead us too.