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So What’s Up With FeedBurner Now?
As many of you know, I was very disappointed when FeedBurner was acquired by Google. The FeedBurner service had so much potential, both from the user- and publisher-side. Not to mention a great team which I had the chance to spend the day with in Chicago. Most (if not all) of the FB crew are gone from Google.
You can read all of my FeedBurner posts over the past two years.
Let’s fast forward to more recent times. Late last year FeedBurner began to move publishers over to the Google hosting architecture. CN was in the first batch of sites that were moved and our feed url changed to a Google domain. However over the past week or so, the url is back to a feedburner.com domain. We’ve heard reports that Google has been pushing everyone to switch over to the Google hosting architecture this month. Of course Google might have just moved the domain over so I am not too worried about this domain name return.
I’ve also noticed a big drop in the subscriber count listed in the administration panel of my account. Several others have contacted me with the same issue and it’s starting to spread on Twitter. While you know I believe that the overall subscriber counts are just as valid as "hits" were in 1995, the more important issue is that each of our subscribers are receiving the proper feed.
There’s been a lot of chatter lately that FB isn’t updating feeds quick enough. After using Gabe Rivera’s trick, I find my feed always updates instantly. If your RSS numbers are down, please leave a comment. You don’t need to share the numbers, just if there is a drop in the overall count.
Last week Google decided to close a number of services and many wondered if FB was next to close. My hope is actually the opposite. I’d like to see Google invest more time and resources into FB because it’s important to both users and publishers. And both of those groups are important to Google’s advertisers and investors.
Update: LiveCrunch has a similar post from today as well.
Note, that BlogRovr has been down for 5 days now… Possibly a good indication of where some of the down counts are coming from…
Oddly enough, it just came back up (got a ping it’s up). Something tells me counts will be back up tomorrow afternoon ;)
I noticed this as well the other day but decided not to report on it before i gave them a few days – said they were down for maintenance.
It does appear the site is back as of tonight – good find!
But the count is still off either way.
Isnt’t there any other service that we could use instead of FeedBurner?
Wow mine jumped from 9200 to 0 from the last 2days. Any update when will their updates complete?
Seems my feed is ok now. It is now a bit higher than my old value. They also changed the graph a bit – looks somehow different than 1 hour ago.
My subscriber count dropped about 50%, but that’s not something that worries me too much as long as people are still getting my feed. More importantly, I’m appalled by Google/Feedburner’s product. I’d pay a chunk of money for something that actually worked and had some value-added features.
For the opportunity cost of letting my content be on someone else’s platform, what exactly are they giving me?
Like other commenters, my subscriber count has dropped by 50%+. On top of that, the “new” Feedburner has some sort of issue with feeds originating from delicious, an issue the Feedburner team still hasn’t been able to resolve after a week. The new interface displays less information and in a confusing format; I had to create a separate Feedburner account because AdSense won’t let me use my gMail address.
And I could go on, but you get the point. I’ve given up on Feedburner and simply make up numbers when asked about my subscribers. “Ah yes, I get an average million hits a day.”
I’ve lost 50% of my subscribers in the last 3 months, mostly in chunks of 500. I know that’s not just me pissing off readers.
Martin
My stats go up and down about 1,500 readers each month. Up one month, back down the next.
Going on 24 hours now…
since I received the email indicating that “my feeds had been transferred successfully.”
And still no feeds listed.
No comments or replies from Google.
Nothing.
Shit. I thought I had finally managed to write something that drove everyone away.
Hey Allen,
My subscriber numbers are down as well. It happened as soon as I made the shift over actually.
Best,
Nick
Cut my feedcount by half.
Ditto, down about 1/3-1/2 over the course of week. Still not back to normal.
Glad I read your post , guess what? After my post 14 hours later I got my Feedburner Icon, my feed subscribers bump up double (still missing few hundreds).
Anyways I feel your pain!
down about 30%, still not recovered
35 hours now since email form Google saying transfer was a success, and still no sign of feeds.
“My Feeds” page says no feeds.
Clicking link to transfer feeds tells me that feeds have already been transferred successfully.
AdSense for feeds says I have no feeds.
Clicking link to transfer feeds tells me feeds have already been transferred successfully.
At this point I would be ecstatic to receive stats saying I had lost half my subscribers.
At least that would be progress.
Kind of incredible that Google has been working on this for over six months, with this result. And I do not rule out that I may have done something wrong, somehow, somewhere, sometime, but since I am receiving no communcation from Google at all about possible fixes or things to try, I just don’t know.
The porblems have continued; but now there is a choice. FeedBlitz has complemented its existign RSS / email / IM / Twitter notification service with a paid, full featured RSS management service. Features metrics reporting, splicing, mering, branding, flares, mobile versions and more. Announcement at http://feedblitz.blogspot.com/2009/03/feedburner-alternative-blitz-your-rss.html
Thanks
Phil Hollows
Founder
FeedBlitz
http://www.feedblitz..com
The porblems have continued; but now there is a choice. FeedBlitz has complemented its existign RSS / email / IM / Twitter notification service with a paid, full featured RSS management service. Features metrics reporting, splicing, mering, branding, flares, mobile versions and more. Announcement at http://feedblitz.blogspot.com/2009/03/feedburner-alternative-blitz-your-rss.html
Thanks
Phil Hollows
Founder
FeedBlitz
http://www.feedblitz..com
[...] we wrote about some of the issues that Google has been facing with their FeedBurner product. I’ve heard from many bloggers who [...]
it’s simple – my count is down like 50% or something since the move – big huge blah
Feedburner has been having some major issues with updates lately. The numbers are currently all over the place. http://crenk.com/are-feedburner-currently-making-huge-changes-to-the-way-they-collect-numbers/
Everyone’s is down, they say it is temporary while they swap it over. I wouldn’t worry.
Our sub count dropped by about 50% a few days ago, but today it’s back to normal.
Google seems to buy a lot of companies and then just put them on the backburner. FB is a perfect example. The buyout was almost 2 years ago and FB has released absolutely nothing new in that time.
The only thing they have done is, as you mentioned, made some people move over to the Google infrastructure/domain. An unfortunate side effect of this is that the FB API does NOT work if you’ve moved to Google. Clicky uses the API to import your sub count and your most popular articles into our interface, but all of our customers who have moved to the new Google system, this no longer works, and there is no workaround (trust me I’ve looked).
Like many people, I used to dream of being bought out by Google. Now, it’s pretty much the last thing I want, as I just feel they would let it sit and die like they have with so many other things they’ve bought. Including Feedburner’s lame stats add-on, Google has bought 3 analytics companies – Urchin, MeasureMap, and FB. Urchin is the only one they’ve done anything with. The other two are dead. Sorry Google but that’s just lame.
Mine hasn’t counted google reader subscribers since last Friday…in the help forums people have said the same thing…quite annoying
Since moving my feed from FB to Google my subscriber count is down roughly 67%.
I had almost 4,000 last week, now it’s only reading 2,400.
Went from 2800 to 1400 on my primary blog. It jumped back up a bit today though. Still not where it was.
Roughly 1/3rd across all our feeds about a week ago, all at once, not yet recovered. I’d give you the exact date but the chart has a never ending rotating circle and won’t load. 1/3 is rough average, some took a bigger hit than others. My personal blog saw a 1/4 cut at the same time.
Ultimately I’ve just learned not to care that much about RSS numbers. We use to go up and down a bit before the transition although nothing as permanent as this. Still, it would be nice to have a reliable platform for tracking.
same here with the rotating circle – at least the circle is going forward not backwards otherwise i think i would be in an episode of LOST.
cn was moved months ago so no idea why it’s so screwed up now.
At least everyone here seems to have feeds.
After waiting a couple of months to let Google work out the bugs, today I clicked on the “Changeover now” button on my FeedBurner page, and now – My feeds seem to be lost.
No listing on the old Feedburner site, no listing on the new Google Feedburner site. Some places I’ve checked seem to be updating, but I can’t be sure. The new url Google furnished doesn’t seem to work everywhere, the old url still does, sometimes..
And the Feedburner support group evidently has an autoresponder that picks one post out of each 1000 to say “I have forwarded your issue to support, you should have an answer in 72 hours.”
It’s a mess. Google has been too busy “Doing no evil” to get the changeover done right.