We’ve been in the YPN beta program (apply for beta here) for a couple months now using it on a couple other blogs, not Hmm, and one of the features I’ve requested repeatedly in the YPN admin poll area is “RSS ads.” They had one of those polls where you could vote over and over and I did. I’m sure they got real tired of seeing my IP repeatedly requesting RSS ads. Well, this morning I just received the email below announcing: “Increase Revenue with Ads in Your RSS Feeds.”

Some readers might remember my attempt to get Adsense for RSS when it was available and was denied because it wasn’t available for Wordpress. Six months later it still isn’t. Of course that didn’t stop Google from applying for a patent on ads in RSS feeds.

Before I got too excited about RSS ads with Yahoo, I remembered my disappointing experience with Feedster Media Network which sounded promising until I found out that I needed to redirect the RSS feeds through them for delivery back to readers. I won’t do that with anybody. Was Yahoo the same deal? I checked into it.

Setting up YPN ads with RSS
To implement, just fill out a form with the RSS feed location and Yahoo provides copy/paste code to put in the RSS template(s). Wordpress and Movable Type are both supported (see screenshot below):

YPN provides instructions specifically where the code is to be inserted but the screenshots are too small.

[optional] Changing the YPN RSS ad frequency (custom mod)
I noticed is that an ad will appear with every post, which seemed like it might be more disruptive than readers would like. I decided to modify the code to only show the ad on the first few posts. To do that I initialized a variable before $items_count like this before the Wordpress loop:

Change:
$items_count = 0;

To read:
$ypnad_shown = 0; $items_count = 0;

Now the slight modification on the ad insertion code:

Now save and FTP your changes to your website and view the RSS feed in the browser to verify that the ad is only showing up with the first three entries. You can change the three to another number to show less or more. A one, for example, would only show an ad on the first post and then no more.

Note: The YPN instructions say it may take up to an hour for the ads to start appearing in the RSS feeds.

Does this disrupt the RSS reading experience?
One of my biggest concerns with using ads in RSS was that the reading experience would be too disrupted. I respect publisher’s wanting to be paid for their content, but I do not like being abused by advertisements trying to read the content; it’s a very delicate balance. I think this might have something to do with why some people trying other RSS ads were experiencing poor clickthru ratios because they overdid the experience. Being a firm believer in ads in moderation, I wanted to see what this experience would be like — as a reader — in several different RSS readers. So I fired up several different RSS readers to check out this feed

First up, Bloglines. Didn’t see any ads, but then didn’t see the most recent post either, so they were not using a current cache. I moved next to Newsgator Online:

The first three posts had the Vonage ad shown at the very bottom just above the author/date section. I noticed that as long as there is a decent amount of content it wouldn’t be like ads were right atop each other. I didn’t like how it showed the same ad multiple times. Made a note to check back later and see if the ads were different for each post.

I checked Desktop Sidebar next. This is the aggregator I currently use most. With this, the only thing you really see are the blog post headlines. If you hover over the headline then a small window opens beside the post with an excerpt of the details. Though this might seem unfair, I judge whether to read most posts almost entirely by their headline (hint to bloggers: write short, compelling headlines). Certain bloggers I’ll click thru and regardless of the headline. So I’m guessing these YPN RSS ads would have zero impact on a reader like me.

Will there ever be RSS ads in Hmm feeds?
Someday, yes, there probably will be, but not as of this writing. For a little while I want to observe how and what ads are being displayed in different RSS readers. I’ve said all along that I support the idea of ads in RSS if they are tastefully done. That last part is what concerns me most and I need some time to make sure that the content isn’t being ruined by ads.

Besides the duplicates, I like the general format and size of the YPN RSS ads. What do you think about them?

I guess readers will know when this is happening here if they see ads appear in their RSS reader of choice. Please, if/when you do see them and don’t like anything about them, write and tell me about it. Of course you are welcome to use the comments section here to object in advance. You do have a voice.

Thank you for visiting and reading Hmm.

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