Kanoodle announces ads in RSS feeds. Unfortunately you can't get much info from their site beyond the press release unless you sign up. They are partnering with moreover.com who also has basically nothing about the service besides the release on their site...

What to make of these attempts to somehow monetize RSS?

I'm not impressed by the ads in RSS schemes so far. I guess I think that you need actual content so people will put up with the ads. RSS headlines are themselves basically ads for the content.

Google's text ads were innovative in that they were just text, and were automatically relevant to the content. That's what differentiated them from the banners that had worn out their welcome. If the RSS ads have some relevance and don't intrude, that's a very incremental advance. But I don't think it's different enough, and it doesn't extend the effectiveness of the text ad model. That makes me think it's not good enough to catch on yet.

The way I use RSS, I still end up going to the web page to get the content, and I see the ads there... No doubt there are many ways to try and stick ads in feeds, but so far they simply clutter the feed. Maybe some things just don't admit ads from a usability point of view - for example, lynx text browsers don't see any ads on Google. So I think we're at an experimental stage - and I don't think it adds any value at this point...

¶ 3/01/2005