Recently, Yahoo! announced that it is closing its Podcasts Directory service. The service will case to operate from October 31st. The site never came out of Beta before this sudden plan to end the service. The reason for ending this service is not yet very clear. There is simply a message on the site that reads “Yahoo! apologizes deeply, but we will be closing down the Podcasts site on Oct. 31, 2007.”

However, some rumours are there in the industry that Yahoo! is planning to make some big changes in their entertainment division, including potentially shutting down Yahoo Music’s subscription service and Yahoo TV.

Yahoo! Podcasts was launched some two years back to allow users to search and listen to Podcasts in different categories, subscribe to them, and rate their favorites. But it was not able to gain popularity as there were no RSS feeds and one has to login with a Yahoo! ID in order to download audio files instead of listening to them through a pop-up Yahoo! audio player.

There are some alternative podcasts services which might be benefited by this new.

Click here to subscribe to our RSS feed to get a daily digest of news around search engine industry. PageTraffic SEO Blog is updated four times a day and is ranked as one of the best search engine resources blog by Pandia!