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We’ve been hinting at this for awhile, but it’s finally time to spill the beans: Starting next week, we’ll be rolling out AdSense for feeds to a small group of publishers, in anticipation of a full launch to all FeedBurner and AdSense publishers “coming soon”. If you start seeing “Ads by Google” on an ad in a feed somewhere, that’d be us.

So what will this mean for you? Well, publishers already in the FeedBurner Ad Network will continue to see premium CPM ads directly sold onto their content, but with the added bonus of contextually targeted ads that will fill up the remainder of their inventory. That means you get the best of both worlds: a dedicated Google sales force that knows how and why to sell onto your content, with the added revenue that full back-fill coverage provides. And with AdSense, you’ll know that your back-filled ads are using the strongest contextual ad engine, ensuring the most relevant and profitable ads are delivered to your subscribers. And yes, ads are also sold via Google’s AdWords program.

For publishers who are not yet placing ads in their feeds, any publisher who meets the requirements to join the AdSense program will also be able to use AdSense for feeds. You will be able to manage your feed ad units directly from AdSense Setup tab, and track performance right on the AdSense Report tab. You can slice, dice, mix, or mash your tracking across feed units and content units, or keep them totally separate. You’re in control. You can still control the frequency and rules around when ads appear in your feeds, without having to mess with templates on your content management system.

You might be wondering what you’ll need to do to use AdSense for feeds. You’ll learn more about the details when we fully launch, but here are the basics: you will need to sign up for AdSense if you haven’t already, and you will want to set up your AdSense channels for “placement targeting” in order to make sure that advertisers can target your syndicated content specifically. As a publisher, you will remain be in control of the campaigns that are targeted at your feed by harnessing the power of Ad Review Center.

And, this is just the beginning of the chocolaty goodness that will come from ongoing integration effort with Google - there are many more “things” and “stuff” yet to come, as we mentioned a few weeks back.

We’ll give you the full details on AdSense for feeds, including supported formats, how to sign up, etc., etc. when we’re ready for the full launch to all publishers. In the meantime, FeedBurner feeds will continue to be fed as usual, and we’ll be reaching out to select publishers individually to try out AdSense for feeds.

Alright, so we’re a little behind on announcing this feature as well. It’s been live for weeks and is a real time-saver for everyone involved: the new, self-service Feed Transfer capability. As more and more people build blogs and burn feeds, changes in content ownership and control lead to the desire to move a FeedBurner feed from one account to another. In ye goode olde days, someone who wanted to transfer a feed to another account used to a submit a request to us, and then a staffer in our own Central Planning and Command-Line Voodoo department would verify the accounts and then complete the actual feed transfer. Reliable, but time-consuming and tedious for all parties involved.

Away with workaday drudgery! If you own a feed, you may now transfer it to anyone you like simply by using the Transfer Feed… link, which is listed on your feed’s details page and is handily pictured below:

Just provide the email address of the person you wish to transfer this feed to and FeedBurner will send them a transfer request email. The recipient clicks a link in the email and then creates or signs into a FeedBurner account and accepts the transfer on-the-spot. The transfer itself will be completed immediately, moving the feed from your account to theirs. (Please note that only feed owners may initiate transfers from their own accounts to others. Additional how-to info about Feed Transfer is in our Help Center topic.)

We hope this update makes the process of moving feeds around much simpler for all of you. Thanks for letting us know just how popular (and necessary) this feature is!

Hi there. You may be looking in your feed reader every day and thinking “Another no-news-’bout-FeedBurner day.” You may be starting to think, “Are they still in there? In the FeedBurner bubble, burning the feeds? Did somebody maybe shut off their connection to the Tubes?” You may be thinking that or worse. We have some good news, and some just newsy news.

First, the good news. We are totally still here, burning the feeds, writing the checks (that’s some sweet cursive Giuliana’s wielding), and analyzing the analytics.

Next, the newsy news, aka “what we did over summer and winter and spring vacation.” If you are looking for juicy announcements, this section is NOT for you. This is more like the academic paper section of the post, except for the fact it lacks erudition and other big vocabulary words. We have been and are busy integrating FeedBurner into a more Googley way of life. This Googley way of life is very different on the backend architecture side, so the team has been busy both scaling and maintaining the existing environment, while simultaneously rewriting the system to act like one of the cool kids in the more Googley (Googly? Can we get a ruling on this one?) architecture world.

So, if you’re a publisher, a good next question is “Um, why are you doing this again?” The answers are numerous, so let’s itemize a few of them:

• Full integration with Google. Integration makes it possible to connect with other Google offerings. For example, only a fraction of our publishers have had the opportunity to participate in the FeedBurner Ad Network to date. We would like to offer this capability to an order of magnitude more publishers, and full integration into Google architecture will make this not just a possibility but a likelihood (more on this in the next couple months).
• More and better services. As any Mies Van der Rohe fan will tell you, “more is more.” By getting our systems fully integrated into a Google architecture, it will be easier for us to provide some services we’ve long envisioned but have never really been able to provide because of scale challenges. These include but are not limited to parameterized feeds (e.g., think feeds of query results), a wider variety of email services (those of you wishing to import legitimate-yet-massive email lists know what we mean), and other stuff. And by “stuff,” we mean “things.”
• Easier to scale as load on the system increases. As more feeds are burned and are hit by more kinds of feed reading bots and readers and API’s and crawlers, even feeds that don’t have new subscribers see increased activity. Full integration into Google will mean an easier time working through performance and scalability bottlenecks, which means the engineering resources now hard at work on scaling can move on to enhancing services.

Why not build new services and integrate at the same time? There are lots of opinions about the best way to go through integrations. Our perspective is that the time you lose trying to continuously merge an updated legacy codebase with a new rewrite causes you be in a world of never actually getting the integration done because you’re constantly working on merge problems, which gives you less time to add new features OR get the new backend integration done, and eventually you kind of grind to a halt, much like Achilles trying to catch the Tortoise in Zeno’s paradox. We’re confident, in fact, that Zeno would have used software integration to illustrate his paradox had he lived in less pre-Socratic times. Anyhoo, we decided to bite the bullet and go full-on integration (while maintaining the existing environment) as much as possible, knowing that it would mean few new features or capabilities while we went on our backend integration journey. So, while we have continued to add hundreds of thousands of new publishers and feeds, you haven’t heard a lot from us despite a lot of hard work. It’s not really that exciting to post “Soon, you will have everything you used to have, only it will look different to the people working on it here!”

There are lots of lots of product integration points that we know people would like to see, and we are looking forward to those as well. These opportunities are not lost on some of the brighter students at Google, and believe me, there are some real brainiacs around here. We keep whispering to each other in the hallways “What if they find out we’re stupid?”

On the customer side, we have been signing up new publishers right and left (or left and right, depending on whether you live in the northern or southern hemisphere), and in fact, our publisher services team is busier than ever. We used to announce all of these new publishers, but it’s a bit less exciting to announce customers that are already customers of other parts of the company without feeling like the kids in school who are the last ones to do everything. (Simulated conversation. FeedBurner: “Hey, we just burned our millionth feed!” Search: “It’s cute how they still get excited about numbers in the millions.”)

There’s really nothing spookier than hollow, empty ad spaces rattling around your blog and/or web site, putting no cash in your pocket nor any extra hob- in your goblin. Before you banish these underperforming idlers to some distant house upon a lonely hill, we recommend redeeming them with a chance to boost your earning potential. This Halloween, the FeedBurner development team is asking those of us who do the announcing around here to make note of the now-available integration of FeedBurner site ads and AdSense.

This newly integrated capability — designed just for FeedBurner-powered content like yours — puts relevant AdSense content ads to work on your blog and/or website. (Note: AdSense options for feeds not available at this time.) If you choose to activate this service, you can run a 300×250 or 468×60 text or image AdSense ad on your blog. The ad will appear below the first item on your site and archive pages once you have installed the necessary code. Ad content is automatically targeted to complement your site and you will earn revenue each time visitors click on ads. You can even customize the colors (or use a saved color palette from your AdSense account) so the ad unit fits your site’s look and feel. Check out these 300×250 examples below.

You don’t have to be part of FeedBurner’s ad network to put these ads on your site, but be sure to review Google’s policies for participating to make sure your site’s content is eligible, as these ads are subject to AdSense terms and conditions. Once you’re signed up for AdSense, you can check out all the other ways you can monetize your site with ads near your non-feed-powered content. If you are currently part of the FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN), and you’ve configured your site to run ads, AdSense ads will be inserted on your web site only when there are no FeedBurner Ad Network ads available for those placements (if you choose).

Get Started
To activate the service, sign in to your FeedBurner account, select your feed and go to the Monetize tab where you can connect this service to your AdSense account (if you already have one), or create a new AdSense account (if you don’t). This service is currently available to members of FAN and all manner of FeedBurner publishers who go >bump< in the night, but haven't yet joined FAN. (Note: If you have enabled FeedFlare for your site, you’ve already added the magic code that makes these ads go where they need to go, so connect your account to AdSense on the Monetize tab and you’re ready to earn!)

Earning additional revenue doesn’t scare me, I t-tell you what. Where can I learn more?
Additional FAQs have been asked and answered over by here.

Happy HallowEARN feed publishers!

Can you imagine adding fun, targeted video content to your site, while earning revenue at the same time? No, really. Picture the majesty, the drama, the undeniable spectacle of it all. Video. Your site. Total togetherness. It’s a dreamlike state.

Whoa, snap out of it! This video-makes-money-on-your-site thing is now a solid reality. Google AdSense announced today a new offering called video units. Video units let website publishers choose relevant content from select YouTube partners and have it streamed to their sites within a highly customizable video player. The videos are supported with user-friendly, targeted advertising, both above the video content and within the bottom 20% of the viewing area. Video units are now available in the U.S. for English language websites that are signed up for an AdSense account.

If you want to learn more and see a sample video unit, you can check out the AdSense blog. If you’re ready to get started, sign in to your AdSense account. You’ll need to sign up for AdSense to take advantage of this new service.

Happy viewing!

This post has been brought to you by Ryan Hayward, aspiring blogger and Product Marketing Manager for Google AdSense.