Yahoo! has discontinued its Ads in RSS service, which enabled network publishers to insert contextual advertising into syndicated content and get a piece of the action thanks to a revenue-sharing program.

This is the e-mail that was sent out to the network members:

Dear Yahoo! publishing partner,

We wanted to let you know that we are closing our Ads in RSS program effective February 2, 2009. We have ended this beta program to focus on other more broadly used ad products for our publishing partners, such as Sponsored Search and Content Match. We recommend that you remove current Content Match tags from your RSS pages.

Please be assured that we continue to invest in both our Sponsored Search and Content Match products and are excited about many upcoming improvements for 2009. We appreciate our relationship with you and look forward to working with you to grow our business together.

Sincerely,

Your partners at Yahoo!

Yahoo refers to Ads in RSS as a beta program, but it was launched quite a while ago; it was formally introduced in November 2005.

Now that Yahoo is pulling out of the RSS advertising space, Pheedo, Text Links Ads’ Feedvertising and Google’s FeedBurner (which isn’t exactly delivering stellar performance lately) are just about the only ones left.

(Thanks to Dave Zatz for the tip)

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Yahoo! Stops Serving Ads In RSS Feeds