Google Helpouts to shut down April 20th

Google is saying goodbye to their Helpouts service on April 20th, 2015. For those who use the service, you’ll be able to download your Helpouts history by using Google Takeout, a data backup service that will be available until November 1st, 2015.

Helpouts was a service that launched back in 2013 that aimed to get people the help they needed through qualified experts. People that have sufficient knowledge on a certain topic would record tutorial videos, available for the whole world to see. If you wanted to learn about a specific topic, you could pay the person giving the tutorial at a set price for a certain amount of time.

So, why is it shutting down? Google sent out an email to Helpouts users explaining that not enough people were using the service. Here’s the full email explaining their reasoning:

Until April 20th, you can still use Helpouts. Until then, Google isn’t encouraging any new listings, and the company won’t accept any new help contributors.

Though this is a unique idea, it’s not really a surprise that Google is shutting down the service. After running into monetization problems and neglecting to add almost any new features or fixes to the service, I think we could all see the demise of Helpouts coming a mile away. Are you a Helpouts user? Does this affect you at all? Let us know what you think in the comments.