AdSense for Mobile but not for RSS? 0 comments Added on 02/05/08 by
Kris
There is no such thing as AdSense for RSS.
Google has run a closed beta for AdSense in feeds for nearly 3 years (that's like a billion internet years) and acquired a company that got feed advertising down to a science but there still is no AdSense for RSS.
So what gives? This a great opportunity to increase distribution of ad inventory and generate more revenue for publishers - the very people that make all Google services valuable.
My feathers are so ruffled on this because Google has figured out how to make AdSense for feeds work, for everyone. It's called AdSense for Mobile.
AdSense for Mobile has dumped the JavaScript copy and paste for server side execution in PHP, CGI/Perl, JSP and ASP. All four of these languages are magic bullets for putting AdSense in RSS feeds.
Why? There are a couple of reasons:
1. Most feeds are generated by blogging platforms that are built on these languages
2. JavaScript is needed to display AdSense ads and RSS feeds with JavaScript embedded in them aren't valid. Which means that most aggregators won't even allow you to add the feed. If they do it won't execute and will display the code inline.
So how do I know this this server side scripting will work?
I tried building an ad network with OpenAds for RSS feeds and very quickly came up against the JS issue for serving dynamic or keyword ads. I spent a couple of hours figuring a way to make it work, very similarly, with just PHP. So when I saw the mobile ads I thought "Bingo. This is it!"
Another reason that I know the mobile code would work for RSS is that by making a simple tweak to the mobile code that is supplied by AdSense I was able to serve the ads in my browser and output them as XHTML.
If a publisher took this modified code and put it in their feeds and made sure that it is placed in a CDATA section within a given name space like they could run AdSense ads. It's just that right now, the ads are formatted for mobile with phone numbers as links instead of urls and the publisher would probably get booted from the program.
Work with us feed freaks on this Google. It's time to stop policing the spigot, you've got the tech in place. Give us a taste.
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