It has been reported by the Silicon Alley Insider that Yahoo is closing their RSS Advertising solution.
Not much word on why — a Yahoo spokeswoman provided this statement to SAI:
Yahoo! is closing its Ads in RSS effective February 2, 2009. The beta program, which enabled publishers to place contextually relevant ads on their own site, was available to a targeted group of small online publishers. We have ended this beta program to focus on other more broadly used ad products for our publishing partners such as Sponsored Search and Content Match.
Silicon Alley isnt really sure why Yahoo is making this move. However, here at Crenk we know that this is just a smaller part of the big move coming from Yahoo. I have heard from inside the company that they are going to be closing a lot of departments within their contextual advertising network. Major changes will be coming with the next three months.
It has been reported today that Co.mments will be hitting the dead pool on the 11th of January. Well according to a post by Steve Rubel this morning the service will be shutting down and the founder Asaf Arkin announced it in a blog post the previous night.
I have never really understood these commenting services, because they dont seem to add too much to the user experience.
Latest news around the blog-o-shere is that Yahoo Podcast is no longer. It has already been reported by RWW, Techcrunch and CenterNetworks.
Yahoo Podcast is a basic podcasting search, directory and listening service, which launched back in October 2005.
Marshall over at RWW notes, “Some would argue that podcasting hasn’t caught on like it was expected to, that it’s been dominated by existing media giants and beaten as a medium by the rise of video. I still love me a good episode from ITConversations, Briefings Direct or our own new show Read/WriteTalk when I’m walking the dog – but Yahoo! users looking for podcasts will soon have to look elsewhere.”
As mentioned by Techcrunch there are a few other podcast directories struggling at present. For example Odeo, which was acquired from investors, then sold, then acquired another directory called FireAnt.
However, the quote of the day for Yahoo is from Allen Stern over at CenterNetworks when he stated that he didnt argee with Marshall (RWW) and the real reason the Yahoo Podcasts are close is that the “The Damn Thing Never Worked!“
