Google drops charges on Feedburner RSS services
Posted 6 July 2007 at 9:17AM by Simon Dickson in Website development
Google has done it again: they've bought a leading player in a particular field, and started offering their previously paid-for services free of charge. This time it's a company called Feedburner, who try to make up for what you might call the deficiencies in RSS feeds.
If you haven't come across RSS, it's basically a way for websites to send details of new and updated pages to their regular readers: either the full text of the item, or a short summary. With the latter, users still need to come back to the originating website to see the full item - so you still record the 'page view', and you still get a chance to push advertising at them. But with the former, it's much harder to measure, and there's no inherent advertising opportunity.
Which is where Feedburner comes in. And it's easy to see why Google might be interested: their feed statistics engine is a good fit with Google Analytics (discussed here previously), and advertising in RSS feeds hasn't yet been Google-ified (although it's easy to imagine how it might be).
Feedburner has just announced that it's stopping charging for its two premium services: the statistics engine, and the ability to hide the Feedburner identity. Feedburner effectively sits between your website and your users: instead of subscribing to the RSS feed directly from your site, users actually subscribe to a URL at feedburner.com, which does all the tracking (and more besides). If you wanted to make it look like the feed was coming from your own domain, by adding a new entry to your domain's DNS tables, you had to be a 'pro' user. Not any more.
It's very easy to sign up: but if your RSS feed already has a large audience, you have the inevitable headache of making them move from your existing feed to the new Feedburner-hosted feed. For a statistics junkie like myself, it's a price worth paying, but yes, there's a risk you'll lose a few people in the transition.
Tags: advertising, adwords, audience, feedburner, google, readers, rss, statistics, usage
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