News 

The ads are beginning to appear in feeds from several of Google's testing partners; the first instances were in around 60 feeds from LonghornBlogs and have since appeared in Engadget's feed.

The adverts are drawn from Google's AdSense programme, which gives the website or, in this case, RSS feed a share of the proceeds.

Robert McLaws, publisher of LonghornBlogs, said that Google approached him six months ago about running ads on his blog. He suggested having them in the RSS feeds as 98 per cent of his traffic comes that way.

'The site costs money, and the RSS feeds are a bandwidth killer,' McLaws said. 'I have to pay for it somehow and don't want to charge people to read. I want to be able to monetise it in a way that is unobtrusive and, at the very least, takes care of my server costs.'

Google declined to comment on the tests.

Yahoo! is said to be also looking at placing ads in feeds.