After 8 years, I’ve decided to stop updating Free iTunes Downloads. My first blog on FiD was on March 4, 2006 and since then I’ve blogged 3500+ entries. As of today, it’s received over 6,200,000 hits and still averages over 600 hits a day. It’s still alive and kicking, but I don’t have enthusiasm for it anymore.
I’ve been like this for a few years. If you look at the first few blogs I wrote about FiD, I was happy at the growth that it was getting. I’ve blogged about it a lot over these years, but there hasn’t been any new news or growth for a long time. In fact, it has been maintenance mode for a while.
I get kind of frustrated sometimes because the scripts I use break, or spam comments appear, or just that I have to remember to blog every Tuesday. I had AdSense on the site to offset my “work” but one of the reasons that I am choosing to shut it down now is that my AdSense hasn’t even worked since November 2013 (and I didn’t notice)! The real nail in the coffin for advertising revenue was when Google decided that they would no longer put ads in RSS feeds on December 2012.
Because FiD relies on RSS as a distribution mechanism, that really killed it. I had tried to branch out the last few years, but it was tough to because FiD wasn’t the new hotness so I didn’t put a lot of effort into it. I create a Facebook app for FiD (which was good for awhile, but then Facebook changed its platform and it no longer worked). I cross-posted to Twitter on @FreeiTunesStuff and picked up a bunch of followers. But I never really promoted it on the new tools.
Also tellingly, my competitor sites quietly stopped operating in 2013. Perhaps they reached the same conclusion as me that it isn’t worth the time/money to do this anymore.
So there ends another chapter and another one of my projects. One less active position on LinkedIn is actually a good thing!
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