Don't Back Down

Much of the world seemed to be really interested in the fact that FeedBurner recently announced that you were now able to flip a switch and see ads from Google AdSense in your site's feeds. If you've been waiting patiently to be allowed into the FeedBurner Ad Network, only to find that you still hadn't made it - or like me, you've seen the option to get in, only to have it not work and the door closed again - then it seems like a nice alternative. At least you can put some ads into your feed in the meantime.

The first step is to link the two accounts. Luckily, this isn't hard - you just need to tell FeedBurner your AdSense account information - email and either zip code or part of your phone number. Then you'll receive an email from Google asking permission to allow FeedBurner into the account. Of course, FeedBurner is Google, so this is a bit odd, but it's really not bad, and once it's done, you can turn on the ads, which is when the fun begins.

You are given the opportunity to add a channel to the ads, and this seems to be a good idea - to track the performance, but I couldn't get these to work, either by using an existing channel (FeedBurner didn't see any) or by creating a new channel that was visible to advertisers (thinking that FeedBurner needed to see an account after they had permission). So perhaps channels just haven't been integrated yet or something. Not a big deal.

Then you get to choose your colors. Most of the aggregators out there will render your text how they choose, so it doesn't really matter all that much, but it certainly doesn't hurt to add some styling - and there's one good reason to add the colors (which I'll get to in a moment). Finally, you choose the size of the ad: currently you can specify either 300x250 or 468x60. Activate the service and you're done!

Interestingly, you are also given the opportunity to get FeedFlare code for your site, but if like many people you already have FeedFlare code, you don't need to do anything - ads will appear automatically on your site. That's probably bears repeating. If you have FeedFlare code on your site, ads will appear automatically on your site. This is why you may want to consider updating those colors - because you will suddenly get ads wherever you have the FeedFlare. It is also unfortunate because you can't do a whole lot with the ad. In my case, the FeedFlare is usually in the footer (though it doesn't have to be), so I suddenly saw extra ads popping up where I didn't want it. I promptly deactivated the code.

While I'd love to see ads in my feeds in some instances, I would also like to have the option to not show the ads on my site - or to somehow be able to control them to some degree and that just isn't there right now.