Google, as you probably know, has announced a beta of Adsense for Feeds.

One of the first blogs to sign up was Longhorn blogs, as described by Robert McLaws. Plug this feed into your RSS aggregator if you want to see what this looks like:

http://www.longhornblogs.com/mainfeed.aspx

There has been much commentary, positive and negative, about the wisdom of and economic imperatives for ads in RSS feeds. One thing that’s already clearly apparent is that Google’s beta implementation is no way optimized for blog content. This undermines the effectiveness of Adsense for Feeds as an advertising platform.

If you look at the LongHorn feed, you’ll notice the same ads popping up over and over, often in adjacent posts. (”Longhorn can wait” proclaims one ad, repeatedly.) This is because most posts in a blog tend to talk about the same thing, and because AdSense for Feeds thinks of posts as tiny isolated web pages rather than part of a larger feed– and part of an even larger conversation in the blogosphere.

Another potential problem is that the ads may detract from the message of the blog. Longhornblogs, for example, is hosted by a company that supports the .Net framework. Inline ads for a competitor to Longhorn– especially one shipping now– do not exactly reinforce the editorial voice the blog seeks to project.

I believe that ads in blogs will happen and will be important for sustaining the blog ecosystem. To do blog ads right, they will need to be more targeted than web ads, they will need to take into account the entire content and nature of the feed and not just indivdual posts, and they will need to give the blog author more of an editorial voice in what content makes it way into the blog.

Having achieved this, the next step will be to target ads based on the feeds that link to a given feed, rather than just the feed itself. A similar concept applies to web pages. Just as the pages that link to a given page help determine relevant search results, they can also help determine the optimum targeted advertisements to display in that contets.

With the right targeting and the right high valued ad inventory, blog ads could fetch a higher value per click than sponsored links in web pages.