has announced plans to shut down its Adsense for Feeds service, a move that continues Google slow dismantling of the Feedburner RSS service.
Adsense for Feeds is (was) Google’s primary moneymaker for Feedburner. The program allowed publishers to make money by putting Google ads in their RSS feeds; when a user clicked an ad, Google and the publisher split the money.
In the big picture, Adsense for Feeds probably earned Google peanuts compared to other Adsense-related services. And by turning off that revenue source, even if it was just pocket change, Google has no business reason to keep Feedburner alive.
Google says it will “begin to retire” Adsense for Feeds on October 2nd and close it on December 3rd. But Feedburner itself isn’t dead (yet). Google says publishers can continue using Feedburner URLs to power their RSS feeds.
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.
The announcement is part of Google’s latest “spring cleaning.” Google says it will also be shuttering things like Spreadsheet Gadgets, Google News Badges and the Places Directory Android app. You can see the full list of updates on Google’s blog.
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