AdSense for feeds: no more Feedflare hacks?

Feedburner has just announced that they will start offering AdSense to a small group of selected publishers. This will mean you will be able to show ads in your feeds directly. We already offer this to the publishers on The Next Web blog but we had to abuse the system a little bit. Right now we use the FeedFlare functionality to add links to our advertisers under each post feed. It was the most easy and manageable way to add a link to each feed without touching the WordPress source files.

It would be nice to see more new features added to Feedburner in the future, something the Feedburner team is promising. One thing I would like to have is more control over the contents of the feeds through feedburner. It is great that Feedburner is adding Adsense but it would be even better if I could add AdSense, or some other content to my own feeds.

Some simple editing features would be great too. Images tend to get screwed up in feeds and it would be nice to be able to have a ‘Don’t show images’ option for feeds.

Another feature that I miss is the option to edit newsletters. Right now people can (and do) sign up for a FeedBurner newsletter from TheNextWeb.org. I can set a few options but have no control over any content. One thing I would love to do is have the newsletter sent out only once a week and then just email hyperlinked titles of posts instead of all posts.

After FeedBurner got acquired by Google they became very quiet with only a monthly update to the blog. For a while I wondered if Google was ‘Dogdeballing’ Feedburner and if it might be smart to go look for an alternative. It seems they are coming out of hiding now with some new features and updates. Just in time?

A few interesting Feedburner statistics:
Total feeds: 1,657,885
Number of publishers: 934,797
Number of podcast and videocast feeds: 229,542