Google acquired Feedburner back in 2007 for a rumoured $100 million dollars. Well now just 5 years later, it seems to be on the way out. Google have announced the end of AdSense for Feeds. This service allowed content creators, usually bloggers, to earn money when people clicked ads in their feeds.
Given that RSS Readers were typically used by the tech savvy crowd, these same users are the ones that generally don’t click ads. Despite the amount generated from Feed advertising being questionable, we know is that it was more than $0 and those with large volumes of traffic will now loose a valuable source of revenue.
Feed readers, as in the people that read feeds are a dying breed with more users heading to Twitter and Facebook for the latest news, RSS Readers are now an endangered species. It’s important to note that Google also ended support for the FeedBurner API last May and will officially turn it off on the 20th of October.
With Google investing heavily in Google+, you have to wonder if RSS Feeds are a distraction and something Google is no longer interested in supporting. So how do you feel about the end of AdSense for Feeds? Will it significantly effect your bottom line?
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More info @ TechCrunch