The FeedBurner Deathwatch Continues: Google Kills AdSense For Feeds
As part of its latest round of “spring cleaning,” Google just announced that it is shuttering AdSense for Feeds. The service, which allows publishers to earn a bit of extra revenue by adding Google’s ads to their RSS feeds, will be retired on October 2 and will close on December 3. Given that Feedburner has long been expected to be on one of Google’s next spring cleaning lists, it doesn’t come as a surprise that the company is now shutting down the only way it was actually making money from the product.
RSS, as a mainstream consumer technology, is mostly dead today (though it still provides a lot of the backend plumbing for many web and mobile apps). Google itself is barely investing in Google Reader anymore and, as far as we know, pulled virtually all of the Reader team into other projects a long time ago. Instead, Google – just like most Internet users – is now betting that people are getting their news from personalized news readers like Zite and Flipboard (both of which at least partly rely on RSS, of course), or from social networks like Twitter, Facebook and its own Google+.
Many publishers (including TechCrunch) rely on the service to publish their RSS feeds. It’s time to reconsider this as the writing is clearly on the wall. There are virtually no alternatives to FeedBurner, though publishers can obviously just manage their own feeds.
Whenever Google decides to drive the final nail in the service’s coffin, it will hopefully make it easy for publishers to switch away, but it will probably be a pretty painful process.
Image credit: Glen Van Etten on Flickr.