Google has confirmed that its paid help community Helpouts will be shutting down on April 20, 2015. This service was launched back in 2013 as a community of experts to get advice and solutions from experts for variety of topics. Experts set their own price for helping. They were paid through Google Wallet service.
Google Helpouts will no longer be available after April 20, 2015. Users will be able to download Helpouts history by using Google Takeout tool. Data will be available to download until November 1, 2015.
Google says that the Helpouts community has good engagement but it didn’t grow as per expectations. So, company decided to shut it down.
With Helpouts, Google came with a nice idea. But there are various forums including stackoverflow let users ask their problems and get it solved by experts for free. And users prefer getting help for free if they can. I think this is the main reason why Google didn’t get expected growth.
Source: Google
