I started thinking that the ads in Slashdot feeds I noticed yesterday may have just been a fluke since they disappeared as suddenly as they showed up yesterday. After looking at the Slashdot feed in Bloglines this morning though, it appears that the ads only show up in specific entries. It isn’t clear how they are determining which entries should have ads, but it is clear that at this point there are not ads for each entry.
So I copied the URL for the one ad I came across this morning on the story about iTunes coming to Australia. It was run through feedstermedia which in turn ran it through DoubleClick which then pointed to page on Sun‘s website (which is what the the ad was advertising).
If you go to the feedstermedia.com website you’ll see there isn’t really much there. They appear to running phpAdsNew manage the feed ads. The only other interesting tidbit was that in addition to Slashdot, Freshmeat and SourceForge also have some data there. Which points us to the Open Source Technology Group (OSTG); which owns Slashdot, Freshmeat and SourceForge. None of this is really surprising, just interesting. It looks like there may come a time when every website run by OSTG will have ads in their feeds.
The general idea of ads in feeds appears to be ready to explode, with Google AdSense testing them out. Talk about timing.
UPDATE 1:30pm 27 Apr 2005: I’m now getting ads in the Freshmeat feed that I subscribe to.