I recently started experimenting with text advertising on fettig.net. I want to get up to speed on web advertising, and the best way to learn is to use myself as a guinea pig. For the past week I’ve been putting text ads from the Yahoo! Publisher Network on my blog pages, which has been making me about a dollar a day - not much, but more than enough to cover my hosting expenses.
As the next step in this little experiment, I’m putting ads into my RSS feed. The idea of putting a little ads after each post in your RSS feed seems like a good one to me. The ad is nice and small, and doesn’t get in the way of your content, but it makes it possible to make money of your feed. I do have one concern, which is what will happen on sites that syndicate my feed. I don’t really want to be injecting ads into Planet Python or Planet Textdrive or any other site that aggregates my feed. So for now I’ve wrapped the RSS ad code in a PHP if statement so it will only show up in this post. This way I can see what happens on the Planets and other sites before I turn on RSS ads for all posts. So tell me: where are you reading this post? Do you see the ad? Is it annoying, neutral, or helpful?