But.

They will lose their readers immediately, so spamming isn’t the question here, although usability and efficiency of such ads is.

Btw, my site (www.improvetheweb.com) was declined, because it has zero PR at the moment (although about 600 links in 2 months of existence, about 40 quality posts – and some comments ). No biggie, as I said, can always develop my own plugin and generously allow myself to use it.

I just hope people don’t start abusing it , we will end up having to install “feed spam filters” in our feed readers.

Matt, I’m not so worried about it getting abused. partly because of the single ad that gets placed. I’m sure people will try to abuse things if possible, but chance are it will just cost them readers than anything else. Will it be prone to click fraud like AdSense? Perhaps, but that’s probably something we’ll all have to live with as long as contextual advertising is around. I’m not sure how the Text Link Ads system works as far as what you pay for. I think it’s more a pay per perfommance system which eliminates click fraud, but I’m not entirely sure.

Now I just need to make some time to upgrade WordPress and apply at TLA.

But my site was declined so I can’t test the Wordpress plugin. Not so good.

I don’t know too much about TLA except that I’ve always heard good things about them. Can’t even recall a negative comment. I like the way Feedvertising looks and how I think it will work. You don’t even need to ever display TLA ads with it, which I think is great.

Yuri I can understand the thought of scaring off readers, but the ads didn’t look to conspicuous to me. Maybe it’s just me, but I really don’t mind seeing advertising. I don’t necessarily buy things because of it, but I appreciate the work that goes into publishing. As long as the ads aren’t in my face and flashing on and off everywhere they don’t bother me. They’re there and if I’m interested I know where to click. If not they’re easy enough to ignore.

Of course I’m not everyone and I’m sure there are some who will be offended by their presence. With Feedvertising you really don’t need to put up a lot of ads. I could use it simply to point out some of my own products (if I had any), which I think is less offensive to many. I could even just add my own branding message to every feed to remind people where they’re reading. Nothing about this screams in your face to me, which is what I like most about it.

Of course the only way to know for certain is to try it out and see what happens. I’ll still need to upgrade to WordPress 2.0+, but that’s on my list anyway and when I do I’ll be giving the Feedvertising plugin a shot.

I trust the folks at TLA and I can vouch for their care in development (not sure how much I can share on how I know this). But trust me, TLA works hard and I’m thinking they willl do what it takes to make this new ad resource user friendly.

Wonder if Feedvertising will scare of loyal readers, though. Not that I wasn’t thinking of customizing RSS feed output to provide additional information about my blog, but ads? Hmm.