The LongHornblog and Engadget are all experimenting with serving Google Ads in RSS feeds. Phil Haack is already wondering whether “Ads in RSS Feeds are effective”
Viewing the Engadget feed in Internet Explorer (http://www.engadget.com/rss.xml), you will notice that there is the Google Ads Table where a TD tag contains the image ads: the image ad’s href points to “http://imageads.googleadservices.com/ pagead/ imgclick/ 1234000377041507?pos=0”
with image src=”http://imageads.googleadservices.com/ pagead/ads?output=png &url=http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000377041507/ The image source URL is completed by cuid=1234000377041507, format=480x46_aff, client=ca-pub-3546992251556849, hl=en, adsafe=high, color_bg=FFFFFF, color_border=FFFFFF, color_link=66666, color_text=333333, color_url=337788, color_line=337788, which are the usual Adsense stuff. It looks like the ad is just an autogenerated PNG image.
One of the contributors to Open Source RSS aggregator RSS Bandit is already experimenting a blocker.
Finally, when are we going to see Yahoo! come up with their RSS ads?