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Why Do We Use FeedBurner and What Alternatives Are Available for Feed Management?
Yesterday we wrote about some of the issues that Google has been facing with their FeedBurner product. I’ve heard from many bloggers who are either moving their feed back to their own domain or are contemplating the move. Let’s take a look at what FeedBurner offers in terms of services and why a move might not be as easy as one might think.
At the basic level, Feedburner provides two services: feed management and advertising injection.
Feed management offers the ability to track your subscribers and insight into how your readers are using your feed. I believe the tracking can be tied into Google Analytics but I haven’t explored this so I can’t comment. There are a variety of “feedflare” items which help you promote your feed via social sites and other services. The feedflare items can live within the feed and/or on the source website. There are other feed management options including: summary feed, geotagging feeds, format converters, etc. In the two years I’ve used FB, I haven’t spent much time investigating these options.
There’s also a feed email management tool which allows readers to receive a daily email of content from a blog. I have found that many of the CN readers like this option. You can also setup a rotating headline animator which seemed to be popular in 2007 but I don’t see many people using it today.
From a monetization perspective, the ad program now runs through Google AdSense. You setup feed ads in your AdSense profile and ads begin to serve in the feed. To be honest, the monetization has been absolutely disappointing especially when compared to the high cpm and top advertisers the FB sales team were able to put in my feed. Some have reported that the ad targeting is also pretty off-base but it appears to be a bit better today.
When it comes to options, there really aren’t many out there. Pheedo is one option that offers basically the exact same services as FB does with a strong support team. Pheedo has a dedicated sales team similar to the old FB sales team and the earnings were much stronger than AdSense for Feeds. My only real issue with Pheedo is that I could never get the feed to update quickly or in near real-time.
What other services are there that could replace what FeedBurner offers? Please leave links in the comments and I will add them to the post. I am also interested in knowing if you serve ads in your feed.
One of the issues with moving your feed from FeedBurner is that it will take some time for the feed address to update if it does update at all. Unlike an email list where you can move providers with no worries because you have control over the list, it’s not exactly the same with a RSS feed. I spoke with a few people over the past month about this and basically what happens is that you “tell” FeedBurner to update your rss to a new address. Then when a reader attempts to retrieve the feed, FeedBurner redirects the feed to the new address. But I hear it doesn’t always work.
For the large bloggers with defaults all over the web and millions of subscribers, the redirect issue could hit them bigtime. Defaults are where a service like Google Reader basically gives x blog a listing so that all new subscribers (or some who pick a package) receive a blog or set of blogs. I am not convinced that non-subscribing defaults will forward to the new address appropriately.
I have to believe that Google values the FeedBurner product because of the content, their Google Reader application and the Google AdSense advertising injection. With all of the public talk over the past days about the issues with FeedBurner, it’s interesting that no statement regarding fixing the issues and what’s coming next for the service has been made. There have also been no updates on the Google Feeds for Adsense blog. But there are plenty of posts on the FB Google Group asking for help.
there is feedoor http://feedoor.com it has more options than feedburner, merging feeds filtering etc. but no ads served yet.
I too am wondering about other options for feed management. I don’t put ads in my feed nor do I really try to monetize my blog because the reason I write it is primarily as a service for public educators and to build reputation for consulting work. That said, when FB fails I feel like I’m losing contact with my subscribers who are crucial to building a good brand.
Random things:
• one of the big benefits to me, small-time, 100 subscribers max blogger has been that my bandwidth usage dropped to near zero. Pre-feedburner I had maybe 50-75 services sucking down my feed repeatedly during the day, the whole feed and not just checking to see if there were any changes. I went from about 1Gb/day to 1Gb/month on my bandwidth usage by switching to FB.
• Stop, do-not-pass-go, log into feedburner now and turn on the “my brand” service. This was a premium service until Google bought FB and made it free to everyone. This allows you to set up feeds.centernetworks.com as an alias (properly: a CNAME) to the feedburner service. FB still serves the feed, but now you control the URL. If you decide to switch, you change where the CNAME points to (I didn’t switch to FB until this service was available for just this reason: I wanted to be able to redirect the feed).
• If you do decide to switch the feed, say tomorrow, don’t kill the feedburner feed. Publish two feeds, the existing FB feed source and whatever your new feed is. Modify the FB feed to include a blurb in each post indicating that the preferred feed is now <link to the new feed>. Run in parallel like this for awhile, even months.
• there appear to be two CN feeds: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Centernetworks and http://feeds.feedburner.com/Centernetworks- (which is linked in your page templates). The former feed returns immediately, but the latter (with the hyphen tagged at the end) requires a redirect and returns a subtly different feed. (Subtly as in: there’s minor XML differences but the content appears to be identical). Which feed is supposed to be the primary feed?
• I haven’t seen much value in the feedflare, and the options haven’t been updated in years
• It’s been my experience that feed tools are incredibly stupid, some follow redirects permanently, others don’t. I have feed URLs which I published in 2001, deleted in 2003, which tools which weren’t even AVAILABLE in 2003 continue to request even after receiving 404 or 410 error messages back.
I highly recommend switching to the MyBRand service immediately, regardless of what you decide to do with FB (one option: ditch FB, and alias the feeds.centernetworks.com URL to a PantherExpress sort of end point so that your site is not getting the full brunt of the various feed slurping tools).
WEBFD: My spouse is a $GOOGler.
Wow – what a comment! I actually tried the mybrand 2x so far and both times was never able to completely get it to work – but you are right – i will try it again this weekend.
feedflare = yep hasn’t been updated in years
two cn feeds = i setup the one with the – first – can’t remember why – i think I screwed up to be honest – then they setup the one without the – which redirects to the one with the -
the whole fb interface needs a rework – get rid of the old crap, etc.
I’m sort of glad that my subscriber base isn’t that big and I haven’t had many logistical problems yet. But I do wonder why there hasn’t been a decent alternative feed distribution service that is commonly known.
Well, I guess there is FeedBlitz (http://www.feedblitz.com/) but it looks like they haven’t touched their service for longer than FeedBurner has FeedFlare.
Allen, thanks for the mention and kind words. Regarding the updating of the feeds, we have several solutions to make feeds update in near real-time including a ping API and self-service option where you can log into your account at anytime and update your feed.
Bill Flitter
Founder, Pheedo
Hy CN, there aren’t alternatives to Feedburner. Pheed is a good service for advertising. Yesterday i write a similar post: http://www.dariosalvelli.com/2009/01/best-alternatives-to-feedburner-le-alternative-a-feedburner-per-gestire-i-feed-rss
@Phil Glocker – our focus at FeedBlitz has been on building the industry’s leading RSS to email service – there are new features and enhancements released constantly, such as our new content abridging upgrade that keeps HTML such as links, images and other layout tags before the cut. We’ve offered an RSS version of newsletters primarily for publishers who don’t have an RSS feed but want one.
FeedBurner’s decline has not escaped our attention, though.
Stay tuned.
Recently feedburner makes headache to me some day the subscribers go to 500
The next day 50 this sense they moved to Google