Last week Google announced a new spring cleaning round, which is basically when they decide to shut down services that they don’t consider important or relevant anymore. Normally those are services that very few people are still using, indeed, but on the latest round that was one curious item: Google AdSense for Feeds.
I use that product, and make a decent amount of money with it (combining all my sites close to $1000 per month). So yeah after December 3rd that will be gone.
I suspect that there are still a lot of people using it as well, as AdSense for Feeds was the main/best method to monetize an RSS feed. Even if you only made $100 per month it was still good money, as it could pay for your hosting fees, for instance.
In other words, I don’t agree with Google’s decision. I would rather have them announce they won’t be updating the service anymore or providing support for it, instead of completely shutting it down.
But hey that’s life. They probably had their reasons, so let’s accept that.
If you made decent money with AdSense for Feeds there’s one immediate alternative: substitute those units with private banner ads or affiliate offers.
The shut down of AdSense for Feeds raises another important question, though: is that a signal that Google’s overall plan is to shut down Feedburner? There are many people around the web speculating so.
If this is the case such a measure will affect A LOT more people. I am sure there will be alternatives around to deliver your RSS feed, but changing that will be a bit of a pain if you have a large subscriber base.
Stay tuned for the next chapter of the RSS saga.
About Daniel
Daniel Scocco is a programmer and entrepreneur located in São Paulo, Brazil. His first company, Online Profits, builds and manages websites in different niches. His second company, Kubic, specializes in developing mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms.
1/3 of my Adsense income is via Feeds – bummer!!
Feedburner is the only chance to have Adsense in e-mails.
Daniel, do you know ANY other ad program that allows placement in a RSS feed?
Daniel,I have seen feedburner subscribers more than 50k in DBT and 125k in problogger ,what will happen to classic feed viewers if Google shutdown feedburner?
@Vincent, I think are many factors involved, and none of them are secrets 🙂 . The language, as you mentioned, is one. Another one are the niches of the websites. As you probably know a finance site with 10k visitors will probably earn 5x as much as a sports site with the same traffic, for instance.
Too bad that Adsense for feeds would close down but lets pray that they do not close feedburner completely.
They say that the Feedburner will still be functional only for blogger.com blogs.
I don’t think many people are making money with adsense for feeds. For a lot of just feeds are just dead for monetizing
@Daniel : with about 30 000 subscribers on 3 sites, my revenues were still ridiculous, you will have to tell me your secret 🙂
(may be the secret is in the language : french for me…)
@Vincent Abry, counting all my sites I have close to 130,000 subscribers via Feedburner.
@Mark, good point.
@Shyam, use the “RSS Footer” plugin to place banners on your feed.
Ohhh damn. Why Google do such things. AdSense for feeds is a good option but now they are going to stop it. Hey Daniel can we use our own method to monetize RSS Feed by using WordPress plugins? Anyway if they close Feedburner what you do and do you have any Great alternatives?
Thanks!
Shyam
That`s a alarming situation Google must upgrade their software`s ,this not a right step to end this and that`s not easy not easy to start up again .
when your next blog on RSS saga coming?
I hope they won’t get rid of Feedburner. Maybe they’ll replace it? Let’s wait for an update.
That’s really annoying. But we should respect the decision that google made. I personally don ‘t use that. but it is really very shocking news for them who have been benefitted from that.
I’ve removed Feedburner for my blogs in cas of since last week. I just offer a standard RSS feeds. Adsense for feed was not so good for me, so no regret. But the eventual closing of Feedburner will provoke hate among users as in the cas of the closing of the iGoogle service.
So if Feedburner were to be eliminated, would Google’s RSS reader be next? I love my Google reader and would miss it
1000$ per month, is it a joke Daniel ? For me it was like 1% of all revenues, so with these numbers I can imagine your earnings are Huge!! ^^
This is really disappointing. As a blogger, I’ve been able to recognize social media such as facebook fan pages are becoming far more important than RSS subscribers, but it still accounts for a decent amount of my followers and it is something I use to keep up with other blogs.
I don’t think by using any alternative method you’ll be able to make $1000 from RSS which you’re making with Adsense, but as you said we should accept the decision.