We are about to begin testing advertising in our search results feeds. It's my intent to be as open and honest with everyone regarding how we are approaching this, so that we can make sure we're doing things the right way.

Why advertising in feeds? To give you an idea of what our traffic looks like, for the month of July, 85% of our search requests went through our RSS feeds. It doesn't take a math degree to realize that, as a business, we're not going to make it with only 15% of our site traffic potentially generating revenue. Typically, RSS feeds are used to drive traffic to a site; in our case, it's the exact opposite. We are driving traffic away from our site, which minimizes our ability to support our system with the bulk of our site usage.

So, how will we implement advertising? It goes without saying that we will never, ever modify any content that comes through our system. Advertising in Blogdigger search results feeds will exist as seperate items, clearly delineated as advertising. In addition, we will include a footer below any advertisement identifying it as a Blogdigger network ad. Our advertising engine is designed to insert an ad at predefined intervals based on the number of results, ensuring that you'll never open your aggregator to find just ads; new ads will appear only after you've received the defined number of new search results.

I have strong feelings about what will and will not work as advertising in RSS feeds. I have my doubts about how well traditional text-based advertising will work when translated to RSS. As such, we're going to test various different advertising formats in our search results feeds, keeping in mind what we've learned and observed so far. The goal is to create what John Battelle calls endemic advertising, where the advertising takes on even greater value since it is relevant to the community consuming it (Richard Macmanus has similar thoughts along these lines).

As an example, we're beginning our test with two sets of advertisments: other RSS feeds (in this case, those from the folks at Forbes.com) and other parts of Blogdigger (try your search on Local, Media or download our toolbar). We will try text ads, as well as various affiliate programs, to gage performance in this new medium.

Throughout the process, we want to hear from you. At the bottom of each advertisment is a link to a feedback page. We'd like your help in determining what works and what doesn't. We've tried to make the feedback page as simple as possible to use, but if you find the need to communicate your feelings in a more expressive manner, you can always email us. And, of course, if you think you have something that would advertise well in our feeds, let us know.

We hope that with your help, we can create a system that helps support Blogdigger, allowing us to conitnue to maintain and improve the service, while at the same time providing you with the best experience possible.

Update: As hard as we tried, we did make one mistake so far; if you have an existing search feed, particularly low-volume search terms, you may see a single ad without any new content. Our apologies, this was unintentional. Thanks to Pete and Jakob for pointing it out.