Last night around midnight I got an email from “Text Link Ads](http://www.text-link-ads.com/ telling us about a private beta for feed ads, which of course they asked us to keep hush-hush. I was sufficiently interested, thinking it could be of some benefit to me, even though “Feedburner](http://feedburner.com already supports ads. But, I didn’t get a chance to test the “beta” because this morning just before noon (less than 12 hours later) I got another email announcing the feature as live (beta over). I have to say I’m a little disappointed.

The feature only works with the TLA plugin for Wordpress, which cuts out a HUGE number of people who are either not on a blog or CMS(Content Management System), or who don’t use Wordpress (me). It seems to me that TLA could have just released a Wordpress-plugin-compatible rss feature without the mini-beta and hoopla.

“Feedvertising will allow you to have complete control over advertising on your RSS feed. Whether the ads come from us, your own in-house efforts, or your affiliate links, the choice is totally up to you!”

Well, guys, that’s not entirely true, is it? I mean, I have NO control over the ads unless I switch to Wordpress, install a plugin (and then edit the plugin to remove all the css forced on me). That brings up another point: why is there css in the plugin? I’ve finally gotten it to look decent on “Godly Creatives](http://godlycreatives.com and then I have to re-install the plugin, which wipes out my styles and I have to do it all over again - dig through the php to find the divs and un-style them -NIGHTMARE.

Announcing something like this the way they did builds expectations and TLA didn’t meet those. Had they simply left the “beta” thing aside I never would have known there was a feature I couldn’t use, so thanks guys, for rubbing it in.

For the record, I am pretty happy with TLA - I’ve made a few bucks, and more than I would with “Adsense](https://www.google.com/adsense/, but there are a few ways they need to get more organized. It could just be a problem with email and announcements (this wasn’t the first strange contact from TLA). Limit the emails to really important stuff - and make them accurate (no false alarms). :)