Extending RSS to support monetization

Steve Rubel observes that it's only a matter of time before Web-based news aggregators wrap content with text ads. Actually, I'm surprised that hasn't happened already. (Well, it has in some sense: many, many splogs these days are built by taking RSS feeds and wrapping them with ads. But that's different.)

As I've mentioned before, monetization of syndicated content poses an interesting conundrum for AdSense publishers. From all accounts, the ads inserted in feeds by programs like AdSense for feeds don't make a lot of money; the best way to make money is still by getting people to visit your site. So you offer truncated feeds in the hope that the article summaries will entice people to hop over to read the full articles. You end up making a trade-off between readership and earnings.

Perhaps what we need to do is to extend syndication formats like RSS and Atom to support monetization. It could be as simple, for example, as embedding your AdSense publisher ID in the feed. The news reader would grab the ID and use it to show ads using some kind of revenue-sharing model — say half the ads would have the news reader's ID, half would have the feed's. There is precedent for this already, of course. Registered members of the DigitalPoint forums can already participate in a revenue sharing program. This isn't against the AdSense terms and conditions as of yet, though there are some potentially prickly issues with letting someone else use your publisher ID on a site that you don't control.

Of course, the readers from the Big Three (Google, Yahoo and MSN) would potentially benefit the most because they could allow feeds to keep all the revenue made from displaying ads served from their own ad programs — because they make money from the ad clicks no matter what. This would give publishers added incentive to recommend those readers to their visitors. I can even see sites serving up different versions of their feeds to the different crawlers — like the full version to the GYM crawlers and the truncated version to other crawlers.

It should be interesting to see how this develops.

Reminder: today's the last day to sign up for my new AdSense newsletter and be entered into the November draw for a signed copy of my wonderful (ahem) book.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!

Comments