Migrate Feedburner to Google Without Adding Ads
A while back a migrated my personal FeedBurner account over to using a Google account as a test run before migrating the Ephox feeds. Unfortunately, I then forgot about it and in the mean time Google added a self-serve migration tool that now requires you to set up an Adsense account to migrate to.
They have huge reams of documentation talking about how much better the monitization of your feed will be now that it’s with Google and they even suggest a few times that it’s possible to migrate to Google without adding advertising into your feed. Sadly, I’ve been unable to find a document that describes how to migrate feeds and make sure that ads don’t get inserted.
It’s really very annoying.
UPDATE: When you do convert feeds over the confirmation email tells you:
Finally, to set up AdSense for feeds, you now need to visit AdSense at http://www.google.com/adsense and choose the AdSense for feeds option under Manage Ads > Get Ads. (Ads won't appear in your feeds unless you set up new ad units for them there.)
So it’s safe to convert feeds, even if it’s annoying to have to set up an AdSense account to do so. Seriously, why couldn’t they make that message clearer in all the posts trying to reassure people about the transition?
February 19th, 2009 at 12:40 am
Wow – so let me get this straight, if you didn’t migrate before the deadline then ads are *automatically* added to your feeds?
Man, I’m glad I transferred mine before that date (I was lucky – I hadn’t looked at my Feedburner account for some time and was setting feeds up for a client which alerted me to the looming changeover date)
If you do find a link with documentation to exclude ads – could you post it here?
(By the way, did you try the “Monetize” tab in your feeds section?)
February 19th, 2009 at 12:41 am
(sorry for the double post – forget to tick the “subscribe by email” box!)
February 19th, 2009 at 12:43 am
Ricky,
I don’t think *think* that’s correct. As far as I can tell they won’t automatically add adverts, but they don’t make it clear how you’d go about ensuring that doesn’t happen and you have to sign up for AdSense even if you don’t want to use it.
The Monetize tab now tells you to go over to AdSense for Feeds and configure stuff there. AdSense for feeds obviously has lots of options for controlling what ads look like etc, but no option I could find to say “don’t ever display any ads in this feed”. One way I can see might work is to do the conversion and then send a request for the AdSense account to be closed. The Feedburner and Adsense logins are actually separate so it *might* work but I don’t want to risk every having ads turn up in our corporate feeds.
February 19th, 2009 at 2:44 am
Hmmm, yes, I see what you mean…
Check this out: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/adsense
it says youh ave to explicitly link adsense with feeds – but I understand your concerns if it is a corporate feed (and the fact that it doesn’t have an explicit statement that they *won’t* be displayed).
Well, I wish you the best of luck.
February 19th, 2009 at 2:51 am
The problem is that now you can’t seem to migrate to a Google account without linking feeds and adsense. I *think* you also have to manually create an ad unit for the particular feed but I can’t be sure. I’m testing with a fake feed at the moment (actually, this site’s feed) but since it takes a while for ads to actually turn up I’m still in the dark as to what will happen.
February 19th, 2009 at 3:15 am
Oh!!! Then I’m certainly glad I changed mine when I did – there was definitely an option to link or not when migrating before the deadline.
Let’s see how things progress over the next few months with it and see if that option remains there… I hope it does.