Google have opened up their RSS Adsense Beta that allows for Adsense ads to be displayed in a sites RSS feeds. Unfortunately they only appear to be accepting sites with more then 100 RSS subscribers and one of the problems people seem to be having is working out just how many people are subscribed to their feeds. To find out how many people are using our feeds, we’ll be modifying our RSS generator libraries to keep a list of unique IPs that have accessed the feeds and then counting them. Another method would be to write a Perl script to analyse web server log files but if you run a Blog or CMS it’s probably easier to simply write code to keep a list of all visiting IP addresses so that they can’t be counted more then once to get a rough idea of how many subscribers you have.
RSS is quickly growing in popularity as a means to keep track of vast amounts of information without visiting vast amounts of different sites, but thus far very few people are actually making any money from their RSS feeds and in many cases RSS is actually costing them money due to subscribers not visiting the sites as often, thereby affecting on site ad revenue.
