August 4, 2023
Howto: Using Feedburner to get rid of Google RSS ads
Here’s an undocumented feature of Feedburner’s summary burner. Basically the summary burner “strips hyperlinks, truncates content, adds teaser message to each feed item”. In an ironic twist (since Feedburner inserts Google Adsense ads into approved feeds), I found that the summary burner also removes Google Adsense ads.
Here’s the Feedburner summarised feed I made of the RSS Weblog from Weblogs Inc. Normally the original feed from the RSS Weblog has Google Ads inserted into every entry. Not with the Feedburner one. They’re gone. Then again so are the hyperlinks. If you dislike those ugly ads more than not getting the feed with links, this is the way to go.
UPDATE: Dick Costolo of Feedburner writes in the comments that one of the TOS policies of Feedburner is that you must burn only your own feed. I scanned over the TOS and I’m not sure but I didn’t see that. If it isn’t there, maybe they’ll clarify that now.
Hmmm! If you do this, then you are gonna miss almost half the content. In which, case, you’ll be clicking thru to the original article and bombarded with even more ads.
That’s the trade off. This technique would therefore work best with RSS feeds that already were truncated but also had ads in them. eg. CIO.com’s RSS feed. It would also work for RSS feeds from content that is usually short enough that you would get pretty much the whole content even in a truncated feed. eg. The RSS Weblog’s feed.
Hey Tim. As usual, you are finding interesting edge cases and writing thoughtfully about them. Here’s my take on this: FeedBurner is meant for use by feed publishers and the summary burner is a way for publishers to offer an alternate view of their feed. It is part of our terms of service that you should only burn feeds that are yours, and if publishers find FeedBurner feeds that have been created by others, those are a violation of our terms of service. So, using FeedBurner to alter a feed that’s not yours for the purposes of providing an alternative view of the content never intended by the publisher would result in something that we would delete if requested by the publisher.
[...] There is another way. A non-sanctioned use of FeedBurner that I discovered several weeks ago. Feedburner has a feature called Summary Burner which removes images and links from a feed. An undocumented feature is that it also removes RSS ads from any feed that you run through it. Feedburner’s official line is that you should only run your own feeds through its service and that it will remove any feed if its publisher requests it. But if the removal of ads in feed clients becomes the new trend then you won’t need this trick for very long. Print Article | Trackback | Cosmos You may also be interested in reading: [...]