The evidence is piling up, eh?
Today many of us got emails from Google about AdSense being removed from Feedburner feeds. Many of us had signed up for what seemed like a fun way to earn some pennies with your feed.
The email title is, “Upcoming retirement of Adsense for Feeds.” Here’s what it says:
Starting December 3, 2012, we’ll discontinue serving ads via AdSense for feeds on RSS feeds and you’ll no longer see feed units in your My ads tab. To check if you’re currently generating any revenue from AdSense for feeds, visit your “Products” performance report and look for recent data for “AdSense for feeds.”
Uh oh.
Now, the email DOES go on to say that the “FeedBurner URLs powered by Google will continue to function” but I’m not the only one that feels like this is a Feedburner death march.
From Marketingland:
Still, all signs suggest that Feedburner is a dying service. As we reported a couple weeks ago, Google failed to renew the Feedburner.jp domain right about the same time that it shut down the Adsense for Feeds blog and the Feedburner account on Twitter. The Feedburner API is shutting down on October 20th, too. And just last week, Feedburner counts were broken for five days.
From TechCrunch:
The FeedBurner blog was shuttered not too long ago. So was the Twitter account. There isn’t even an official Google+ FeedBurner account. The last time there were issues with FeedBurner’s stats, it took whatever is left of the team five days to restore them. Just last week, as our own Romain Dillet reported, Google announced it was going to shut down the FeedBurner API. Also, as Barry Schwartz notes on Search Engine Roundtable, nobody is taking care of the service’s forums anymore and Google even let its FeedBurner domain name for Japan expire.
A question that the TechCrunch article asked, though, is this: is RSS dead anyway? Apparently Google is also pretty much ignoring Reader (which is how I read everyone’s blogs) and instead using Facebook and Twitter to keep up with blogs. Many smart bloggers I know strongly encourage readers to use the email subscription option instead of RSS.
What do you think? Do you still rely on your readership using your RSS feed? Are you worried about losing Feedburner?
