Please Don’t Kill FeedBurner!

Google has a long checkered past of buying services that some people like and then later killing them off.

It looks to me that might be getting ready to happen to FeedBurner. Now, this is going to affect a lot of bloggers because a lot of podcasters use FeedBurner. It’s a basis of a lot of RSS feeds and… whether that was a smart move or not remains to be seen because everything seems to be pointing to the fact that Google is going to be killing off FeedBurner. It is more just a matter of “when”.

First, it was that the API disappeared. The API no longer exists for FeedBurner. Now, the Twitter account has disappeared for FeedBurner. The Google+ profile for FeedBurner has gone away. Google is letting certain FeedBurner domain names go away – like the one in Japan. And now, AdSense for Feeds… which is the way that you could actually put Google Ads inside of your RSS feed. Well, they’ve turned it off.

And that one is actually more meaningful because that was really the only way that FeedBurner made any money for Google. Obviously, Google thought it wasn’t a big enough deal for them and they just killed it. And now, all that’s left for them to do is to kill FeedBurner itself.

Now, of course what is it going to mean for us bloggers? First of all, it means that you want to get your feeds off of FeedBurner. That’s really where it comes down to. We don’t know if FeedBurner is going away but all signs are pointing in that direction.

You Don’t Really Need Feedburner, You Know

So, one thing you definitely have to keep in mind is that if you’re using WordPress, you have an RSS feed built right in. If you just plug-in your blog URL and then put “/feed/” at the end of it, you will have an RSS feed. It’s built right into WordPress and you don’t need FeedBurner.

So keep that in mind. You can point your users directly to that web address like “yourdomain.com/feed” and they still subscribe via RSS.

Now, why else would you want to use FeedBurner? Well, it is nice to know how many people are using your RSS feeds and a lot of people are using it for the subscriber count.

Now, bear in mind, I’ve said this many times because I come into blogging from more of a business orientation… I don’t think the number of RSS subscribers matters all that much. I really wouldn’t worry about it. I think that your email list is significantly – by orders of magnitude – more important than your RSS subscriber base So, do you really need to know that number of how many people are using your RSS feed? Probably not.

So, again, give up your FeedBurner because you don’t need that count. At the top of my head, I don’t know of another way to get it, but I’m sure, that it exists.

You can also go and check out their competitor called Feedblitz. Feedblitz has really cool features in there and if you mainly only want to use them for RSS, I believe the service is free. If you want to use RSS-to-email, then you have to pay a little bit. But even then, it’s going to blow the socks off of what FeedBurner was doing for RSS to email. So that’s over Feedblitz.com.

Tell Google To Keep Their Hands Off

And then lastly, a site that we’ve got on this video… if that’s what you’re watching right now, that I recently came across, is something interesting. It’s called Please Dont Kill Feedbuner.com. Definitely go check that now. It’s going to give you the rundown of what’s been happening and it has some ways that you can actually get your message to Google to basically plead with them not to kill off FeedBurner.

Are they going to listen? I don’t know. Who knows what they’re going to do? All I can tell you is that even if they ultimately decide not to kill FeedBurner, just the fact that they’re killing off all these surrounding things with FeedBurner… it really shows that they don’t really care about it at all. You might want to consider ditching the service.

But anyway, if you want to check that site out at “pleasedontkillFeedBurner.com”, it’s an interesting site, Very timely and I think you should probably check it out.