The Internet is lamenting Google’s gobbling of Feedburner’s ad network (FAN), but is this really something to cry about? I think not:
1) The namechange is really just the final phase of an ongoing rebranding that necessarily happens when one company eats another. A corporate consistency thing. The monetization opportunity is not going away.
2) But while the opportunity may not be going away, the profitability of in-feed ads is shaky. RSS feeds are terrible environments for persuasive brand advertising. Feeds are content bits that have been stripped of their publisher’s trappings and populated into white label feedreaders. It’s very hard for brand marketers to make an impact in such a generic space. It is, however, easy for direct response marketers to serve up colorless CPC ads (AdSense!) and build an altogether larger payoff than brand banners would provide, perhaps. But that strategy relies on the continued growth and popularity of the early adopter style of feed consumption…an iffy proposition.
3) So, to get down to it: RSS consumption in its raw form is dying. The true innovation of RSS was the idea of content portability — taking a stream of information and plugging it into other publishing platforms, infinitely, malleably. The goldmine advertising opportunities for this portable content exist on these final destination sites: blogs, social networks, mobile apps, news sites that import or distribute this raw content. Tying ads to the information bits in the initial, raw RSS state is a fading model. Obviously that leaves all kinds of questions about how the initial publisher of the content is to get his keep, but as we all know, the market for information will find a way to settle the score.
All that doesn’t mean that Google won’t find a way to make some real bucks from AdSense in feeds. There will certainly be a place for tying (probably, direct) marketing into these original streams, and it may well be inescapable to ensure that some early publishers get paid, but brand advertising dollars will continue to flow elsewhere to move minds.