Adrants posted this tidy little screenshot from a Flickr user who's none too happy about the seeminly irrelivent ads being pumped into the Washington Post Politics RSS feed. Frankly, I can't say that I blame them. From the "just because you can doesn't mean you should" category, we're seeing how just pumping irrelvent ads, even when they're part of the feed item (post, article, what have you), into feeds causes a rash on just about any self respecting feed consumer.

We've talked about this before, and we'll say it again. Ad pumping into a 'high-context' content rich environment is far from a good idea. Contextually relevant content-centric ads placed properly into feeds, either as standalone ads or as part of an item, are a far better bet than what we see here.

There are a couple of other things that are noteworthy in this discussion

The disadvantage, again, of just pumping ads into your feeds is that there's no SERVICE to help you out in this endeavor. With a proper service component, the ad-to-content ratio becomes part of of the analytics provided with some real intelligence behind the math. Point being that you need more than just 'ads' to make an RSS advertising strategy, or any content monetization strategy for that matter, really pay off for you.

Again, there's not much data to support this, and you can bet that your ad pumping friends aren't going to come up with it. To really make headway in this space, there needs to be more research around what's really working - full feed or summary, and where the ads are garnering the best CTR. More to the point, ads in a 'full feed' item vs. ads in a 'summary feed' item will *likely* require a different tact. Again, no data to support this yet, but I'd error on the side of 'let's approach them with unique tactics' than on the side of just throwing ads in every which where.