AdSense for Feeds

~ the obituary ~

Google put AdSense into RSS feeds as a public beta in May 2005, after a quiet pilot on a handful of blogs that spring. The proposition was plain enough: you already syndicated your posts, people already read them somewhere other than your site, and that somewhere was earning you nothing. Google would drop a small ad block at the bottom of each item and split the take.

It stayed in beta for three years, which tells you how much Google cared. Then in June 2007 Google bought FeedBurner for a reported hundred million dollars, and in May 2008 it finally rolled AdSense into FeedBurner's publisher accounts. The 2005 experiment was folded into the acquisition and stopped being a separate thing.

That merger is the whole story of what happened next. FeedBurner handled the plumbing for a large share of the RSS feeds on the English web, counting your subscribers and keeping the feed standing when your blog fell over. Those services were free. AdSense for Feeds was the one component that sent money back toward Google, and it was underneath everything else.

On 28 September 2012 Google announced the end in a batch of cuts it was still calling spring cleaning in late September. AdSense for Feeds retired on 2 October and closed on 3 December.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually paid ~

Not much, for most people. Feed readers in 2008 were a narrow slice of a blog's traffic, and ads in that slice rendered as a line of text under the post rather than anything anyone would call an impression. Publishers who ran it mostly reported numbers you would describe as a rounding error against their on-site AdSense.

For a small tier it was real, and those were the feed-first publishers, the ones whose audience had moved almost entirely into readers and never loaded the site at all. When the slot closed, those people had no replacement from Google and had to go to FeedBlitz or to nothing.

~ the knock-on ~

TechCrunch wrote the obituary as a FeedBurner deathwatch rather than an AdSense story, and that was the correct read. A product inside Google that earns zero and costs engineers is a product with a date on it. FeedBurner's own blog had already gone quiet and its Twitter account was dormant before any of this was announced.

FeedBurner then did something nobody predicted. It kept running. Google moved it to new infrastructure in 2021, stripped the email subscription service out of it, and left the feed-burning core alive as a free utility. It is still there, a piece of 2007 web infrastructure that outlasted its own revenue by more than a decade.

~ where I was for this ~

On the reading end, in a university town in Turkey with broadband that had finally arrived around 2006. I ran feeds the way everybody technical ran feeds then, which meant a reader full of English-language blogs I checked more often than I checked email. I never published anything through FeedBurner and never had a feed worth monetizing, so the ads at the bottom of each item were just furniture to me. The people they mattered to were on the other side of the pipe.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »