Caution: Feed Ads With Care

I recently chatted with Brent Hill, VP of business development at FeedBurner about optmizing RSS advertisements. To get the best performance, ads should be placed within the text of an RSS entry, and not individuals items, he said. One ad should be listed for every two to three pieces of content, and surprisingly RSS text ads perform better than graphic ads.

FeedBurner recently signed a deal with tech publisher IDG to produce ads for feeds for its PC World, Computerworld, and Macworld properties. Buzzmachine and Adrants are also clients of FeedBurner.

Keeping track of how many people have subscribed to your feeds is a hassle, but FeedBurner has some basic free services for managing feeds, as well as some handy widgets for displaying feeds, such as Headline Animator and BuzzBoost.

I haven't seen any tools for publishers to be able to consolidate multiple feeds into a single feed to simplify the subscription process. For example, a publisher such as could Wired News could enable readers to choose which of its feeds to receive, and then send them out a single feed of their preferred content. Someday.