AdSense for Feeds is a program for AdSense that allows you to place ads in your RSS Feeds through FeedBurner.
Why Ads in Feeds Are Important
If you maintain a blog, news feed, series of videos, or other regularly updated series of posts on a website, one way to grow your readership is by providing an RSS or Atom feed of your posts. This just organizes your posts by date into a nice XML file that other computer apps can recognize and redistribute. That's why you have tools like feed readers which allow you to organize and read the posts from many different sites without having to bookmark them all.
Now, you've got a feed, and other feed readers can redistribute your content, as can other websites. Wait? Who's going to visit your website and click on your ads, if all your viewers are reading your site somewhere else? You could try making a partial feed and hoping readers click through to read the rest of the story, but you might lose a lot of readers who won't click through.
One solution is to go where the readers are and put ads right inside your feeds. That way it doesn't matter as much if someone redistributes your feed on their website or only reads your site through a feed reader. You still have the potential to be paid for your ads.
FeedBurner Ads
You can specify the appearance of ads, whether they appear at the top or bottom of posts, and how long an entry should be before it has an ad. Basically, Feedburner ads are just like any other form of AdSense advertising, except for a slight workaround. Most AdSense uses a JavaScript code that you insert into your website. JavaScript won't display on RSS feeds. To get around the problem, Google uses inline advertising images. Clicking on the ad redirects you to the advertised page, just as it does on any other AdSense page.
Just as with other forms of AdSense, the ads can be blocked by ad-blocking Web browser extensions.
AdSense for Feeds replaced the FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN) service, which FeedBurner provided before they were acquired by Google. FAN used multiple ad sources, and AdSense only uses Google. If you have an AdSense account, you can activate AdSense for Feeds by going to your AdSense Settings tab. Read the terms of service to make sure your ad placement and behavior abides by Google's rules, or you'll risk having your entier AdSense account shut down.
Revenue Potential From FeedBurner AdSense for Feeds
Are you going to make millions from FeedBurner ads? Probably not. Most bloggers do not make tons of money and instead blog because they're passionate about their subject. That said, if you have an enormously popular blog, you stand a chance of making money from the ads in your feeds. Part of this depends on how many people click on the ads, so the blog has to be enticing, the ads have to be relevant, and your readers have to be viewing your content from a Web browser or website that isn't blocking ads.
In most cases, AdSense for feeds should only be a supplement to the other elements of your blog monetizing strategy.
