There are times when Google is out of the blocks before anyone even know there's a race on. It's so far ahead in searching that you have to wonder whether anyone ever uses anything else. And its advertising tool, of course, continues to yield better returns for both publishers and advertisers than any other company comes even close to doing.

But sometimes it just dawdles. Apple outmaneuvered Google on software for mobile phones and members of Yahoo's Publisher Network have long been able to put ads in their RSS feeds. That at least has now changed.

Recently Google added AdSense for Feeds to its AdSense program. This is a huge improvement. It could have a massive effect on our incomes and on the way we deliver our content.

Ever since readers have been able to sign up and collect content in dedicated feed readers, one measure of the success of a site has been the number of subscribers it gathers. It's an interesting figure but for professional publishers not a very helpful one. On the one hand, we want as many people to read our content as possible and someone who chooses to subscribe is clearly a very dedicated reader. From the point of view of advertisers, those opt-in, self-selectors are exactly the sort of people they want to reach. On the other hand, we couldn't earn a dime from someone reading content in an RSS feed except by offering them headlines that tempted them to click through. For many subscribers, that defeated the whole purpose which was to read without surfing.

The ability to put an ad – and it's just the one ad – in an RSS feed means that it's now possible to monetize your content however it's delivered. Google points out that "[o]ften, the audience reading your feed is a separate audience from those who visit your site." Now we can earn money from both of them – and because the RSS subscribers have opted in, we should be able to earn a lot of money from that sector.

It's too early to say how exactly that's going to happen but you can be sure there is an optimal strategy. We'll have to test different post lengths to find a balance between keyword density and clickthrough rates. We'll have to play with positioning to discover when ads work best at the top of the feed and when they do better at the bottom. And perhaps, most importantly, we'll have to make sure the channels are set up in a way that brings in targeted placements.

Now it's time for us to be fast out of the blocks.