First sighting of Yahoo Publisher Network RSS ads

September 16, 2005

I spotted Yahoo Publisher Network ads in an RSS feed today, the first time I have seen them delivered via a feed. They look very similar to AdSense for Feeds ads and are formatted in the traditional ad unit styling.

The ads are delivered as images and seem to have an autogenerated script of some sort as it contains start and end tags in the RSS code.

Ads by Yahoo!

Here are screenshots of YPN in RSS:
http://www.jensense.com/archives/ypnrssad1.gif
http://www.jensense.com/archives/ypnrssad2.gif
YPN has a poll for active publishers in the control panel, and this was what I chose for the feature I would like to see soon… although it was a toss up between ads in feeds and a YPN for Search option.

I am looking forward to getting my hands on this one… I never had much luck with AdSense for Feeds, but one of the problems with having a blog about contextual advertising is that no one has the tendency to click the ads because “don’t click the ads” is something many publishers practice - whether it is their own site or another publishers site. But there definitely seems to be differences between YPN and AdSense on this blog that visitors seem to favor YPN over AdSense. So I am very interested in trying this out and seeing if the trend follows through to the RSS ads as well.