RSS Ads - had anyone ever seen anything other than Vonage?

'Cause I haven't.

If you guys are not happy about relevancy of Web ads, wait until you implement RSS. There is literally nothing other than Vonage there. I'm curious: is it just my sites or other people are also seeing just this advertiser alone?

 

I get pet related ads on my RSS feed.

 

vonage seems to dominate, might want to add them to your exclusions.

 

Hah! I excluded the RoN ads and now my RSS ads are all for YPN itself!

 

Tut: I see normal ads in your feed. If you are only seeing the YPN banner, you might want to check your cookie settings. If you disallow cookies, the system won't show you ads.

 

I have been running YPN RSS for a month or two before it launched, and I have nearly always had targeted ads in the RSS, and can't actually recall seeing more than an occasional RON here or there..

I actually found targeting with YPN feeds much better than with AdSense for Feeds. Once I got site targeted by an advertiser who bid high enough to pretty much be the only ad that ever appeared on my JenSense blog, it was also the ONLY ad that would ever show in my AdSense RSS ads... and no one ever clicked.

 

Are you talking about YPN in general or YPN RSS ads specifically? RSS ads are not JavaScript based (image tag instead). I guess, this does not necessarily mean that the server-side system that supplies the image does not check your cookies, but I thought the whole idea behind getting rid of JavaScript in the RSS ads was to make it work in most RSS readers. I honestly don't know if there are many RSS readers out there that do support cookies. So, I don't think cookies play any role in RSS ads. I you know otherwise, please post here. Would be nice to learn more about the way the system operates.

 

Thanks for the insight, Jen. Do you think it's fair to say that the program was actually manually tailored for your feed since they let you in earlier than it was available to public? Also, I presume you have only one feed, and it may be helping with relevance. In my case I have about 20 feeds from one site about rather diverse subjects, and it looks like the diversity confuses the system. Besides, I am yet to see YahooSIM bot hit on any of my RSS feeds. So how the heck do they know what the feed is about? Do they use a different YPN bot for RSS?

I've tried three times to apply for AdSense RSS but was turned down. Based on this data I will probably wait a few more months before re-applying ...

 

kscaldef was right, I had cookies allowed only for originating site. When I activated cookies for advertisers, I got ads. I am using bloglines on Safari.

The targeting is better than for the non-RSS ads (I have most RoN ads blocked).

 

Mr. Tut, my caffeine does not seem to kick in yet I don't get exactly what you are saying. Can you elaborate on that? Are you talking about security settings in Safari?
Say, you had cookies allowed only for your own site and could not see any ads.
Then you allowed cookies for ypn-rss.overture.com (or overture.com for that matter) and the ads started showing up? I hope you did not mean to say that you had to manually go and allow cookies for every advertising website that uses YPN!
I did not do advanced research on that, so to speak, by my initial impression is - it was not too bright an idea to rely so much on third-party cookies 'cause most people would have them disabled in their standard security settings. Besides, there may be a lot of RSS readers out there that simply do not understand/support cookies

 

I always see ads on my site. I am talking about viewing my site's feed in the browser-based RSS aggregator Bloglines.

When I viewed my feed in Bloglines originally, I saw ads only for YPN itself.

It turns out that Safari has three levels of Cookie security:

"Allow always"
"Allow never"
"Allow only from sites you navigate to (For example not from advertisers on those sites)"

I was using the third choice because, I believe, it is the default. Now I am using "Always" and my RSS ads show properly in Bloglines.

Sorry if I wasn't clear before.

 

The Safari default settings block third-party cookies. Its actually a pretty rare default. Overall, most RSS readers actually do permit cookies.

I think that Jen gets high relevance in her RSS ads because she has a very focused, very commercial blog, so semantically targetted ads outperform RON for her content.