Is feed advertising that lucrative?

I’ve been a Feedburner Ad Network (FAN) member since February. That’s after I hit the 500 subscriber mark last December. Looks like 500 is the magic number to get a FAN invite.

Since then, I’ve been running RSS ads thru Feedburner. The ads do not appear automatically but you get notifications that your blog is included in an ad campaign, of which you need to approve. Using Feedflare, ads will either appear on your RSS feeds or on your blog (ever saw one of those Flash ads about the Blackberry Curve?)

In the last 6 months though, my total FAN revenue is a mere $42.23.

Yeah, a true low-earner — very close to Adbrite’s performance. However, there could be several reasons for this, some, very inherent on the fact that your advertising to the rss-reader crowd:

• Low CTR. Very evident on the chart above. RSS readers are not click happy. That’s why they’re using feed readers, right?
• Geo-targetted? Probably. Some of the ads will only display for feed readers from certain regions.
• No email ads. Feed subscriptions via emails do not contain ads, which should be rightfully so.

As it is now, do I think it’s worth it? I think it’s too early to say — let’s see on the 12th month. On the other hand, since FeedBurner is now part of Google, are we expecting some changes in the payment options aside from the Paypal-only delivery? I do hope cheque deliveries will be available soon or maybe Google will just include that in our AdSense cheques?