FeedBurner Review

by Paul on April 20th, 2005

When it comes to blogs and tracking how well your RSS feed is doing there is no better tool than . FeedBurner offers many different tools you can use with your RSS feed as long as you go through them.

All you have to do is signup (they have a free account and a feature-rich pro account) and show FeedBurner where your feed is. From there, FeedBurner “burns” your feed and you use the address they give you for your feed. It’s simple to setup and I have been using it for all my new sites.

Quick Feed Serivces

Stats

This is the high point of using FeedBurner to manage your feeds. You are able to see how many people are subscribed to your feed and the amount of clickthroughs you receive on each entry. A breakdown of what feedreaders are used is also provided.

From the stats I can see that I have increased my subscription readership by 50% since April 1. Not bad at all.

SmartFeed

Enables your feed to work in any reader.

Browser-Friendly Burner

Improves feed XML appearance if viewed in a browser.

Commerce Services

This is a part that I am sure many of you are interested in. Making money with RSS feeds is a new concept and hasn’t really taken off yet and I am not sure it ever will. In any case I have given these services a test run.

Amazon.com Associates Services

This allows you to earn Associate referral fees by sticking Amazon ads into your feeds for products that might relate to your entries. I don’t use this one since I don’t cover too many products in my entries, with the exception of Insert 25.

Overture Advertising

As Darren pointed out I have Overture ads in the feed for this site. This is done all through FeedBurner. They put the ads in there and you are given the choice of how frequently you wish for them to appear (every ad, every 2 ads, etc.). Obviously they take a percentage of the revenues that you generate, but am not sure if they tell you how much.

I haven’t seen a check yet and stats aren’t provided for how well they work so I can’t give you much input. I only use the ads on this site and Insert 25 which aren’t high trafficked sites so my test sample isn’t that good. On larger sites with a greater readership these ads may work a bit better.

Many Other Services

There are many other services available, but I don’t use any of them currently.

If you haven’t tried it yet, I suggest you give FeedBurner a shot. It’s free and easy to setup, but if you already have a feed that is subscribed to you have to use some rewrite magic to get your readers over there without them having to do anything.

The Star
Apr 20, 2005 at 1:15 pm

Just a quick note - you may not be aware - but sometimes when clicking to read your article from my feed reader (FeedDemon - not sure if that matters), feedburner times out.

It happens too frequently for my tastes - however, I have no problems going directly to your site. (It’s not just your site either, it happens with any site in my reader using FeedBurner)

I wonder if anyone else has experienced this…
Scrivs
Apr 20, 2005 at 1:24 pm

Hmm, never heard of that. If it happens too frequently feel free to use:

https://workboxers.com/index.xml
Jacob G.
Apr 20, 2005 at 1:57 pm

Actually, this is has been happening to me a lot too lately with sites that are using feedburner.

Thanks for the alternate link Scrivs
Michael Moncur
Apr 20, 2005 at 3:47 pm

Same here, feedburner’s redirect for click-tracking links times out on me frequently. It’s something that makes me reluctant to switch to feedburner myself.
Scrivs
Apr 20, 2005 at 4:22 pm

Well this is certainly no good. Looks like I will have to stick with using the default feeds. Thanks for the information people.
Darren Rowse
Apr 20, 2005 at 7:48 pm

i’ve not had issues with it myself…hmmm

btw - with the Overture ads - they don’t seem to be available for everyone - is it still in testing?
The Star
Apr 20, 2005 at 9:34 pm

Thanks for the alt link Scrivs - duly updated :)
Ryan Latham
Apr 21, 2005 at 12:50 am

Yes; Overute links are still in testing, for some reason I ended up with 2 feed burner accounts. I must have been drunk and forgot the password; one has it available the other doesn’t.
James Archer
Apr 21, 2005 at 2:57 am

If you’re going to use Feedburner, you might want to set up an htaccess to mask it using a local URL.

That way you don’t have to ask everyone to resubscribe to all your feeds a few years from now if something better comes along and you stop using FB.
Nicole Simon
Apr 21, 2005 at 5:56 am

If only linkclicking and timeout is the problem - wasn’t that something you could easily refer not to?

Just uncheck ‘count link clicking’ i think and you should be fine.

Perhaps I do have less problems because of bloglines.
JLP
Apr 21, 2005 at 11:33 am

What I don’t understand about Feedburner is how much my number of subscribers fluctuates during the day.
Apr 21, 2005 at 12:18 pm

Scrivs, hi there. Dick Costolo from FeedBurner. We uploaded some new statistics code yesterday that will go live in a week or two, and during the deployment process, one of our deployment machines got hung up and that prevented us from fully servicing feed requests for about 10-12 minutes. However, we’re not aware of any other issues with serving feeds (this would have been around 12:30pm eastern time yesterday). As to the overture questions, that program is indeed still in testing. Please notify us via feedback at feedburner d.o.t com if you notice any other timeout issues and we’ll dive into it right away. We’re going to poke into our logs yesterday for your feed to see if there were any other anomolies for it outside the 12:30-12:40 window.
Scrivs
Apr 21, 2005 at 12:36 pm

Wow, thanks for the update Dick. I am sure everyone is glad to see the quick feedback from feedburner (was that corny?).
Apr 21, 2005 at 12:56 pm

Scrivs, no sooner did i write my post than I tried a couple other things on your feed. While the feed itelf loads snappy fast and most of the links were snappy fast, I did see that two of the clickthrough links took much longer to load than they should have. We’re looking at this right now to see what it could be, and I’ll let you know as soon as we get it resolved. We’re doing a huge code migration this week to add more stats detail (including ad performance) and a premium stats option, and that may be causing this issue, but I’ll keep you posted. Everything’s generally fast, but a couple of your clickthrough links interrmittently take way too long. We’re on it.
Scrivs
Apr 21, 2005 at 1:01 pm

JLP,

Maybe I can answer that question. The number of readers you see when you view your stats are for that 24 hour period so depending on what time you view your stats it can always fluctuate. The only real way the number can stay the same is if you view your stats at the same time every day and all your readers check the feeds at the same time they do every day.
JLP
Apr 21, 2005 at 1:34 pm

Scrivs,

Thanks. I just noticed that Feedburner is now not counting my Bloglines numbers so my feedburner stats are about half what they normally are.

JLP
Apr 21, 2005 at 1:53 pm

Scrivs,

a) problem fixed. our stats enhancements yesterday added some code that slowed down link rewrites in odd cases, and that bug has been fixed in production. you and your subscribers should now see no delay on any links or retrievals of feedburner links.

b) JLP, Bloglines just recently accessed your AllThingsFinancial feed today and you should therefore see your live stats updated to count the bloglines subscribers to your feed. Shoot us an email directly if you have any other questions, and I won’t clutter up Scrivs’ comments with my replies to other people! ;)
Mathew Patterson
Apr 22, 2005 at 6:23 am

Douglas Bowman of StopDesign has a and how he redirects his feed URLs.

b5media.com

Work Boxers