Robert McLaws: FunWithCoding.NET - Longhorn Edition : AdSense in RSS - Explained
The cool thing here is that Google is willing to push their revenue stream into many different areas even if it puts it original revenue stream at risk. Rather than Google forcing people back to the website, where they have their standard ad sense revenue stream, they put their ads into the RSS feed. In fact, this gives them even more exposure, but these ads are absolutely ripe to be stripped out. Interestingly, Google decided to render the ads as images rather than text... apart from being costly on the performance side for Google, I'd imagine they will be much more costly to download as well. One of the very cool things about RSS is how it's practically a nothing download and can be read in any device or format with little trouble. These images are forced to be of certain dimensions. Still, I have to respect Google for pushing the limits. I wonder what will happen when the next big thing comes along and Google has to do something that is a little bit more onerous such as interstitials or something similar.