Google AdSense is retiring link ads soon. Thoughts?

Anyone using link ads here? Google says it will be retiring the ad unit by February next year. Thoughts?

Link ad units make more than 50% of all Adsense income on my sites. I don't understand, why Google decided to retire this type of ads. It will bring a huge decrease in income and have no idea how to handle it and what could be a good alternative. In my case, link ads perform 10 times better than content ads, really.