The Big Picture

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Google Destroyed Feedburner

Tuesday, October 28, 2008 | 08:30 AM

I used to see a decent amount of ad dollar revenue via Feedburner. High quality ads, a few grand a month, all of which I plowed back into development. Feedburner essentially paid for the new site redesign.

Then Google took them over, and its been a total clusterf*&k ever since. They replaced a quality ad program with Adsense -- and its total shit now. Utterly embarrassingly dreck. How worthless it is? The revenue dropped about 90%. Gee, why aren't you folks reading TBP clicking on payday loan ads and mortgage broker leads?

Google took a wonderful RSS feeder -- and its still an excellent RSS/email feeder -- and made it irrelevant. Formerly strewn intelligent, higher end advertising, and completely destroyed it. Customer service is a disaster, the interface blows, Adsense is a pain in the ass -- Feedburner has become utterly worthless as an advertising platform. October ads threw off under $500, down 75% from the pre-Google days, despite RSS feeds more than doubling over the past 3 months.

Don't be evil? How about "Don't be sucky?"

To give you an idea of how irrelevant the ads served by Adsense are, yesterday, the Big Picture RSS feed had 40,305 Ad Impressions, which generated a grand total of how many Clicks? How about 17, or 0.04%. That's about what you would get from people accidentally clicking ads when navigating their email. Its just god-awful.

Anyone have any good alternative suggestions for another RSS feed? I am looking for simple RSS, with quality, relevant ads. The RSS traffic is between 25,000 and 30,000.