Google Opens Up Adsense for RSS

Google has opened up its  contextual Adsense ads for RSS feeds to any web site owner. There's one catch, however. You must have more than 100 feed subscribers to sign up. Most people don't have any idea how many people are pulling their feeds - unless they use a service like Feedburner. Although 100 readers is certainly a low bar, this gets me wondering if Google is perhaps going to count a feed's RSS subscribers as part of some broader master plan for feed monitoring or perhaps searching. Is some roll up with newly-acquired Urchin in the cards?

Comments

[Nathan Weinberg]

Steve, could you clarify this? What does "open up" mean? Are you saying that blogs based on platforms other than Typepad or Blogger are now being accepted, or that all Typepad and Blogger blogs (with enough subs) are now eligible?

[Tom]

Actually, you can tell easily in Bloglines as to how many people are subscribed to a feed.

[Dirson]

I'm still seeing the same blog platforms (Blogger and MT), and the same languages (Spanish not included).

I don't remember wether the '100 readers' limit was included or not, but in this post (published in May) was already commented:
http://blog.apathyant.com/2005/05/adsense-for-feeds/

By the way, Google states:
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/answer.py?answer=20012
"We're currently beta testing AdSense for feeds"

[Nathan Weinberg]

Well, Tom, you can only see a portion of your readers in Bloglines, namely the portion that use Bloglines. If you have access to your site logs (something Blogspot users do not) you can get a better accounting, since all "good" RSS readers list the number of subscribers in their referral log. Suffice to say, if you have more than 20 Bloglines subscribers, you probably have enough for AdSense For Feeds.