FeedBurner Tests Real Time Stats

Ever since Google acquired FeedBurner, the feed management service hasn't improved significantly. After a painful process of migration to Google's infrastructure and the launch of AdSense for Feeds, FeedBurner started to stagnate.

The good news is that there are still people who work on improving FeedBurner. Their latest project is a new FeedBurner interface that offers real time stats.

"The real story is what's new under the hood: the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens. Additionally, if you use the FeedBurner Socialize service, and your platform uses PubSubHubbub or you ping us when you post, you can for the first time get stats on how much traffic your feed items are receiving from Twitter, as well as feed reading platforms like Google Reader in one place. Again, all within seconds of posting your content."


The new interface is inspired by Webmaster Toosl and it doesn't include all the features from the old FeedBurner. It's all about stats and it's really fast. FeedBurner's real time stats will convince many people to visit the site more often and see how many Twitter users read their posts.

FeedBurner Socialize: Add Your Feed to Twitter

If you've used TwitterFeed to post updates from a blog to your Twitter account, you'll like FeedBurner Socialize. It's a new FeedBurner feature that distributes the content from a feed on Twitter.

"To get started, go to the Socialize service on FeedBurner's Publicize tab and add the Twitter account to which you would like to post items from your feed. You can take the default settings and click [Save] to start socializing immediately, or use the options we offer to customize exactly which feed items are sent to Twitter and how exactly you would like them to look. The next time you post a new item to your feed it will be sent to Twitter," mentions FeedBurner's blog.

Socialize uses Google's new URL shortener and it adds a parameter that helps you track Twitter traffic in Google Analytics.



My favorite thing about FeedBurner Socialize is that the tweet is posted immediately after I publish a blog post. That's because both FeedBurner and Blogger support PubSubHubbub, a protocol designed for near-instant notifications.

The Troubles with Google FeedBurner

Migrating FeedBurner to Google Accounts hasn't been a smooth process and the new FeedBurner doesn't look very promising. Last month, Google officially launched AdSense for Feeds and asked those who want to join the program to "burn" their feeds using FeedBurner. If you were already using FeedBurner, Google provided an email address where you could contact a Google employee to manually migrate your account (since then, the email address has been replaced by a form).

After a day or two, FeedBurner's new home at feedburner.google.com finally allowed you to log in. Some people found that the number of subscribers dropped to 0, but the most visible changes were the features which have been removed. The Googlified FeedBurner no longer includes web stats probably because of the overlap with Google Analytics, the feed stats history isn't available and you can no longer manage the list of email subscribers.

Another strange issue is that Google Blog Search stopped indexing this blog and many other blogs after migrating to the new FeedBurner. There are many other bugs related to this transition, but FeedBurner failed to acknowledge them.



Update. In about 2 weeks, Google has addressed some of the issues:
* Blog Search indexes feeds
* you can manage the list of email subscribers (there's even a new option to filter that list)

Google Launches AdSense for Feeds

I noticed a new option in my AdSense account: AdSense for feeds, a program that displays contextual and placement-targeted ads in FeedBurner feeds. FeedBurner announced in May that AdSense for Feeds will be available to a small number of publishers and now it seems that everyone can use it.

FeedBurner has recently closed FAN, its advertising network. "No new applications for FAN publishers are being accepted and we expect the broad variety of options provided through AdSense (including the new AdSense for Feeds product, powered with FeedBurner feeds) will give publishers valuable new revenue-earning potential," says a FeedBurner/Google employee.

The new AdSense for Feeds option lets you create a new ad unit that has a format automatically selected from 468x60 and 300x250. "Generally, the 300x250 size will display when there's more content and when your feed is being viewed in a device with a larger display," explains Google. You can choose if you want image ads, the ad frequency, the position (top or bottom of the post), the colors and a channel that tracks the ad performance.



For the moment, there's no connection between your AdSense account and the FeedBurner account, so Google automatically adds the FeedBurner service to your AdSense account. Unfortunately, your feeds are still connected to the old FeedBurner account and you need to migrate them first. The migration process is manual: just send an email at adsense-support-aff@google.com and mention your FeedBurner username and the AdSense account email address.


From AdSense, you can easily burn a new feed by entering the address of your blog and selecting some tracking options. The feeds can be managed at the new FeedBurner site, but there's no visible change other than the integration with Google Accounts and the new URLs for feeds: http://feedproxy.google.com/NAME.


Here's an ad from a feed of a FeedBurner/Google employee:


I doubt that these ads are an effective way to monetize feeds, since people use feed readers to get timely updates from a lot of sites and spend less time for each item. Besides, feed readers are mostly used by tech-savvy readers that are less likely to click on ads.

At some point, I may experiment with some infrequent ads in Google Operating System's feed and I'll post my findings.

Resources:
AdSense for Feeds Help Center - you should read the tips
Migrating an existing FeedBurner account
The new FeedBurner homepage

FeedBurner's New Home

FeedBurner announced in April that it will migrate all its users to Google Accounts. But there's an interesting side-effect: Google will no longer use feedburner.com, opting to use some new subdomains on google.com. It seems that FeedBurner's new home will be feedburner.google.com, a site that announces you can use FeedBurner to "analyze, publicize, optimize, and monetize your feeds". For now, you can't log in or create a new account at feedburner.google.com, but this should change when FeedBurner starts the migration process.


The feeds hosted by FeedBurner will also move from: http://feeds.feedburner.com/name to http://feeds.feedburner.google.com/name, as you can see for this feed. FeedBurner's redirects will start with http://feedproxy.google.com/ , another new Google subdomain.

Google didn't change the branding, but it's clear that FeedBurner will be integrated in many Google services and its identity will slowly dilute.

FeedBurner FeedFlare for Blogger Comments

Now that FeedBurner is owned by Google, it makes sense to integrate with other Google services. One of the most requested features, a FeedFlare that shows the number of comments for each post from a Blogger blog, has been recently added. The FeedFlare links to Blogger's (ugly) comments page so you can easily add a comment if you read the post in a feed reader. Note that the comment feed has to be enabled in Blogger's settings page.

FeedBurner offers a FeedFlare API, but you need to do some server-side coding to create dynamic FeedFlares like the one that shows the comment count.



{ Thanks, Pat Hawks. }

FeedBurner Moves to Google Accounts

After Google bought FeedBurner in June 2007, we didn't hear too many new things about FeedBurner. A post from February detailed the benefits of the future Google integration: connecting with other Google services, better performance and new features. "Why not build new services and integrate at the same time? (...) Our perspective is that the time you lose trying to continuously merge an updated legacy codebase with a new rewrite causes you [to] be in a world of never actually getting the integration done because you're constantly working on merge problems."

It seems that the Googlizied FeedBurner will be brought to life soon. FeedBurner Blog announces that "in the coming weeks, upon visiting www.feedburner.com, selected publishers will have the opportunity to sign in using their Google Account". That means you will be offered the option to choose a Google account as a new home for FeedBurner. The posts mentions that the integration with other services will be added gradually and it's easy to anticipate the relaunch of AdSense for feeds or a new tab in AdWords.

The most visible side-effect of the Google ownership is that the premium accounts and MyBrand are free, so you might save at least $96/year. In the past 11 months, FeedBurner doubled the number of users and now has "882,989 publishers who've burned 1,570,012 feeds".

{ Thanks, Hebbet. }

Redirect Your Blogger Feed to FeedBurner

If you have a blog and start to use FeedBurner to manage your feed, you have to change the autodiscovery link in your template and redirect the old feed to FeedBurner, so you don't have to tell your readers to subscribe to the new feed. Until today, there wasn't option to redirect the feed in Blogger, but now you can simply go to Settings > Site Feed > Post Feed Redirect URL and add the address of your FeedBurner feed.


Blogger offers several feeds for blog posts:

(1) blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml - the old address for Blogger's ATOM feed
(2) blogname.blogspot.com/rss.xml - the address for Blogger's RSS feed
(3) blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default - the full feed
(4) blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/summary - the summary feed

... but Blogger only remembered about the first one. The other three don't redirect to the new feed, which is pretty strange, considering that the feed #3 is new Blogger's default feed.

FeedBurner's blog notes that "by redirecting your feed, you can get a true picture of how many subscribers you have. Some of you might even see a few more subscribers magically appear, though results will most certainly vary."

Even if Blogger mostly introduced this feature for FeedBurner, you can redirect your feed to any other address (for example, to a feed that mixes posts from all of your blogs).

Last week, FeedBurner started to offer its premium services for free and it's pretty clear that, unlike other Google acquisitions, FeedBurner really moves fast.

Google Makes FeedBurner PRO Free

Google is about making things accessible to everyone and one of the way to make this happen is to buy a service or software that used to cost money and release it for free. Google did this with Blogger PRO, Picasa, Keyhole (now Google Earth), Urchin (now Google Analytics), SketchUp and now FeedBurner PRO. According to UnderGoogle, the first visible effect of the FeedBurner acquisition is that you can use the advanced features of FeedBurner for free: reach (the unique number of people who view or click your feed posts) and stats for individual posts. Just go to "FeedBurner stats" and enable the features that used to be inaccessible until today if you didn't want to pay $5 a month for a subscription.

By default, FeedBurner already enabled the reach metrics for everyone. "Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed. Subscribers is a measure of how many people are subscribed to your feed. At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this "Reach" measurement provides this additional insight."


And other good news: FeedBurner MyBrand, the service that lets you serve your feeds from your domain, is now free. It used to cost $3-$14/month, depending on the number of feeds from your account. "With MyBrand, publishers can continue to take advantage of all of FeedBurner's services, but provide a transparent experience by running everything through their domain."

{ Thank you, Carlos. }

Update: FeedBurned confirms this. "Beginning today, two of FeedBurner's previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free. Not in the sense of soaring high above the clouds or recently sprung from the hoosegow, but free like you'll no longer gladly be billed on Tuesday for a burned feed today. We suspect this will be welcome news to the 450,000+ of you using many of our other free services, but understanding that your feed is your feed, you will need to activate these newly freed-up services in order to partake in their awesomeness."

FeedBurner Is a Part of Google

You can replace FeedBurner with Google and Blogbeat with FeedBurner in the image above. The rumors turned out to be true: Google acquired the Google of feeds, FeedBurner. The reasons are many, but the most important ones were to improve Google's analytics tools and to add a new medium for AdWords advertisers.

"[FeedBurner's] web-based tools, including an extensive feed and blog advertising network, help publishers promote, deliver, and monetize their content on the Web and make feed-based content more accessible and manageable for its end users. (...) Google believes that feed-based content and advertising is a developing space where we can add value for users, advertisers and publishers."

FeedBurner's team is optimistic and it doesn't seem to be scared by the fate of some of Google's acquisitions (like Measure Map, Dodgeball, JotSpot) that are barely visible right now:

The fact is that there is an immense amount of work to do in order to a) continue to provide our customers with the best feed analytics, b) begin to provide a more comprehensive 360-degree view of audience and reach, and c) enable publishers to most efficiently determine the best ways to distribute and monetize their content.

We like our chances. We are confident that we are going to be a part of the company that can best deliver the most comprehensive suite of services to publishers. We are confident that we're going to continue to have fun and innovate for customers as rapidly as possible. We are confident and hopeful that you'll look at your feed dashboard soon and say to yourself "Well, *that* was a good idea!"

Moreover, Feedburner could provide a lot of useful information to Google Reader to filter the most popular/interesting/relevant posts and could enhance Blogger's feeds without having to "burn" them at feedburner.com.

If this isn't a good news for you and you're using FeedBurner, you can opt-out of allowing Google to get your data by sending an email to accountx@feedburner.com until June 15. "Opting out will terminate your user agreement with FeedBurner, permanently delete your FeedBurner account, feeds, and all related statistical data and history, and prevent the transfer of your data rights to Google."

Should Google Buy FeedBurner?

When I first heard about FeedBurner I wondered what's so great about "burning your feed". Well, you get stats for your feed, you can customize your feed, add dynamic content at the bottom of each feed entry and transform that weird XML file into a nice HTML page that lets people subscribe to the feed.

FeedBurner transformed from a site that offered a way to make your feeds more humane, to the one-stop-shop for bloggers. They now offer stats for your blog, email subscriptions for feeds, ads for feeds and blogs. FeedBurner has dedicated services for companies, so there's no wonder that AOL, Wall Street Journal, Reuters are among their clients. But even if FeedBurner grew so much over the years, they keep adding new features, the customer support is excellent even for non-paying users.

There's a rumor that says Google intends to buy FeedBurner and this seems a very good idea. Not just because FeedBurner is the Google of feeds and has a great team. What could FeedBurner do for Google?

* make Blogger's feeds smarter out of the box

* FeedBurner's services could become totally free (currently you have to pay for more advanced stats)

* offer a lot of interesting information to mine

* integrate the stats for feeds with Measure Map and create the perfect analytics solution for blogs

* FeedBurner has a very big number of feeds: more than 700,000. Google has a lot of advertisers, but the AdSense for feeds program is still in closed beta.

The Market Shares of Online Feed Readers

Feedburner, that hosts more than 600,000, is in a good position to offer some statistics about feed readers. The most popular feed readers are web-based, so it's interesting to know how they stand. Feedburner decided to ignore the total number of subscribers, because it's pretty irrelevant, and looked at the number of posts that are actually read and at the number of clicks to the original site.

If you look at the number of clicks, the top 5 web feed readers are (it's interesting to note that Yahoo is the only one that displays only the titles):

1. My Yahoo 54%
2. Google 21% (Reader + Personalized Homepage)
3. Bloglines 11%
4. Netvibes 9%
5. Live.com 3%

In terms of post views, the situation changes a little bit (Yahoo couldn't be included here because you can't read posts inside My Yahoo):

1. Google 59%
2. Bloglines 33%
3. the others had 3% or less.

So the most important online feed readers are My Yahoo, Google Reader/IG and Bloglines, although it's hard to make a comparison between Google and Yahoo from this data. Google has more subscribed than any other feed reader, though: 76% from all FeedBurner feeds have at least one Google subscribers, unlike Bloglines (63%) and Yahoo (51%), which don't have a wide coverage.

Google and Bloglines seem to attract more tech-oriented users, but also more diverse users than Yahoo (hence the feed coverage). Google tries to satisfy both users who read a lot of feeds (and would choose between Google Reader and Bloglines), and users who subscribe to a manageable amount of feeds (Google Personalized Homepage or My Yahoo should be a perfect match), so it's in the perfect position to become the number one destination for reading feeds, if it's not already there.