Text Link Ads, which I wrote about yesterday (More about text link ads) and a couple of months ago (Monetizing your site with text-link-ads), has a new service called Feedvertising, which I had a tiny bit of input into regarding RSS and Atom web feed formats. (You can learn more about RSS at my RSS Case Studies journal, which shamefully hasn’t been updated for a while due to time constraints.)

Feedvertising is just like regular TLA ads, but they’re inserted into your weblog’s web feed. If you don’t know what they are, read What are RSS/ Atom/ Web Feeds? on my old Chameleon Integration pages. In a nutshell, web feeds are kind of like a headline service for your weblog. Each time you post an article, its headline and an excerpt is added to your “web feed”. Most blogging platforms generate a feed for you, but it could be in RSS, Atom, or RDF formats - or all three.

The size of the article’s excerpt is configurable, depending on whether you are using a web feed management service like a Feedburner. However, your blogging platform, if it generates a web feed, usually lets you specify it as being either “full-text” or “partial-text”.

Which one to use has been a point of debate, as “scraper” software tends to steal full-text (and partial) web feeds for republishing on MFA (Made-for-Adsense) websites/ weblogs, without permission. This happens to only one of my sites, but to several of the sites of clients I write for.

Well, there are a few ways to combat this, and one “positive” approach has been to put advertising into web feeds. That means that if your content gets stolen and republished elsewhere, your ads will too. So at least you will potentially benefit from this situation, provided the sites in question haven’t been blacklisted in the search engines.

That’s not the only reason, of course, to have ads in your web feeds, since you will benefit from ads in your own feeds. And you can republish one of your feeds on another of your sites as a mini-blog. So there are all kinds of positive reasons for having ads in your feeds.

If you decide to go with a full-text mode for your web feed(s), and if you qualify for Feedvertising, you’ll find that you can have your own ads (links) via Feedvertising - which could be a way to promote some of your lesser-trafficked websites. Find out more about Feedvertising at Text Link Ads (affil link).