Gadgetopia

Once you've figured out how much money you make per subscriber, could you give me a shout? I'd be happy to pay you for an ad-free feed behind an auth-wall, but I read you for fun, not for have-to, so I'm not going to help pay for Larry and Sergey's next jet by being distracted by wildly non-contextual "contextual" ads in my aggregator.

Phil, it won't be long before aggregators start including ad-filtering scripts. Give it a month or two, and every aggregator will have an option for filtering out AdSense.

I do about four times the volume in RSS as I do in HTML, but I know that ad revenue from RSS won't be near what HTML is because (1) the RSS users are generally more Net saavy than the HTML users, and (2) no one "stumbles" across an RSS feed like they do the HTML page in a Google search. It's the "stumblers" that usually click the ads, not the regular readers.

I really wonder how many publishers will stick with this program.

Once they see how poorly targetted the ads are (I mean, who's going to publish their full-text feeds just for the ad relevancy) they will drop this like a hot potato.

Actually they said their ad targeting is based on the full text of the article from the web site link, not from the feed. They've said that they want you to publish the full-text feed because its good for users, not because it affects their ad relevancy.