Here is the situation:

1. If blogging has a business model, it is based on advertising.
   
2. Blogs are posted on Web sites, which carry the advertising.
   
3. RSS feeds are increasingly adding ads to the feeds, BUT
   
4. The revenue from the ads goes to those providing the feed, not to the content creators.
   

Below is a typical Feedburner RSS ad, which appears in Newsreaders but not on Web pages. We'll discuss it after the flip:

UPDATE: After this was posted, Feedburner vice president-business development Rick Klau wrote the following. It is directly on point (as the lawyers say):

While I can only speak for FeedBurner, we only splice ads into feeds for publishers, on behalf of the publisher. We never splice ads in a feed that the publisher didn't ask for, make money from, or know about, ever. It's the same type of model as web advertising solutions that you use on your site, and you make most of the money.

FeedBurner is a publisher service. We only perform those services on a feed that a publisher wants us to perform, and that goes for everything, whether it's splicing ads, applying a stylesheet, or tracking statistics.

No blog site manager running our service can be unaware that their feeds have ads in them because it is impossible to get ads in your feed at FeedBurner without either directly contacting us or selecting the AdSense for Feeds program and providing us with all the details needed to splice in those ads.

The ads on newsreaders come from the feed producers, outfits like Feedburner, and not from the blog sites. The New York Times is a major buyer. Blog site managers are often unaware their feeds have ads at all.

The only ads that Feedburner advertisers to publishers on its site are Google AdSense ads. So where is the UNFoundation.Org account going? The foundation currently has a Feedburner campaign in operation. For RSS readers of blogs like Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo, these may be the only ads seen. How much of that money is Marshall getting?

These questions are vital, but most aren't even asking them, let alone answering them. We'll keep asking them. As the RSS reader becomes the user interface of choice for blog readers, blog ad revenues are being siphoned off by companies like FeedBurner, changing the mix of ads people see, and moving control of ad content and pricing from sites to a syndicator.

It's time to deal with this.

UPDATE: I take Mr. Klau at his word. I point out, however, that the amount of money available from an RSS ad in Feedburner is trivial compared to the amount of revenue available from advertising space on a typical Web page.