• by Shankar Gupta , September 30, 2005

Blog and RSS search engine and advertising network Feedster will within the next two weeks release a product that will allow small publishers to more easily place ads in their RSS feeds, Feedster Vice President for Sales and Marketing Chris Redlitz said during a panel at OMMA East this week.

The product will be more self-service than Feedster's current RSS ad program, Redlitz said, and will allow publishers to place ads in their feeds in a manner similar to Google's AdSense.

To complement the product, Feedster will also release a feed-profiling tool later this year. The product, Redlitz said, will profile a blogger's feeds using Feedster's index--and will deliver ads based on the overall content of the feed over time, not individual posts. For example, a blogger who writes about politics 80 percent of the time would still receive politically relevant ads the other 20 percent of the time when he blogs about, say, his cat.

Redlitz said Feedster can glean a substantial amount of information about a publisher's feed from the index; marketers, in turn, can use that information to decide whether to advertise on particular publishers' sites. "Because for most of these properties we have their entire published history from day one, we have frequency of publishing, we have content--we can determine if they use profanity or not," he told OnlineMediaDaily in an interview after the panel.

During the panel on Tuesday, Redlitz touted RSS for its potential to deliver targeted, opt-in, contextual, and spam-safe ads. But he cautioned against misusing the medium in the same way that e-mail has been misused. "We don't want to make some of the mistakes that have been made in the past," he said. "It's very easy to subscribe, but it's very easy to unsubscribe, too."

In March, search giant Google released an AdSense for feeds product into beta testing, where it currently remains.