Complaints about Feedburner, a service that helps websites manage their RSS feeds, have been around as long as the company itself. But you’d think that when Google spent $100 million to buy the company, they’d get it together.
But things haven’t gotten better. Instead, the service is becoming unreliable. Feedburner problems plague website owners far more than they should. And while Google is notoriously slow in absorbing its acquisitions, it’s far past time for them to get their act together and turn Feedburner into a grown up service.
Sites like ours rely on our RSS feeds to distribute content widely. Nearly 2 million TechCrunch readers access our content primarily through our RSS feeds, and many of those people never visit the site at all. But even so, they are among our most valuable readers because they’ve taken the action to subscribe to our content feed. For the most part, they don’t stop reading.
But when those feeds don’t work, it’s a terrible experience. The most common problem we’ve seen over the years is a general slowdown in content distribution. For various reasons, Feedburner can delay news for minutes or longer. When news is breaking, that’s a deal killer.
The biggest reason to use Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds is the data you get back on how many people are accessing the feed, what they’re reading, etc. Some of this data can be made public- for example, we’ve included a widget on the site (currently on the bottom right of the page) that displays how many people accessed the RSS feed the previous day. Usually that widget says 1.7 million or so. Today it says zero. Lots of other people are complaining about the same thing (also see the screen shot from Twitter search below).
The main Feedburner blog was shut down in December 2008 and everyone was told to head over to an advertising-focused blog for Feedburner news. I think it’s great that Google wants to do a better job of inserting ads into feeds to make money for publishers. But they have to focus on the quality of the service, too, or the ecosystem won’t work. The message they’re sending to everyone is that the service doesn’t deserve a blog, just the advertising they bolt onto it. Imagine if they did the same thing with search.
Feedburner also has a known issues page that shows what’s currently wrong with the service. It’s clear from that page that the team is having a lot of problems just keeping the lights on. The fact that this most recent issue, broken stats, isn’t reported there yet even though its days old is another red flag.
Feedburner being down is about as acceptable to me as the electricity being turned off at my house. When it happens, nothing else gets done until its fixed, and a lot of other things are directly or indirectly affected.
If Google wants to continue to manage our feeds, we need assurances from them that they want our business. Right now, I don’t believe they do. The people working on Feedburner clearly care about the product and their customers, but they either don’t have enough people or enough resources to take care of business.
The same is the case with many blogs I visit… Most of the blgos have got more than thousands of reader count to 0. Well I don’t see any change on mine
I read a post on this already on CenterNetworks @ http://www.cent...r-google-update and my readers count went from 9200 to 0, but now its back to 9396 @ http://www.amit...awani.com/blog/ , may be some temporary issues!
It’s one thing for Google to give up on Lively or Notebook, but this is a service that tons of sites rely on for business. As many people have said, if you want to start a competitor, this would be the time.
http://kisalt.net/d2
i think rss will die soon
You must be funny
I’m not sure if RSS will ever really die.
We do need something faster.
Lets call it SuperRSS
I fear change and am not ready for SuperRSS. Can we call it RSSv6 to give me another 10 years to prepare?
The problem is probably very temporary and they are very aware they caused it. It has to have something to do with merging feedburner with the rest of the googleplex and datacenters.
So what’s the best alternative?
I’ve noticed problems with my new feed (http://feeds2.f...BaadWorldometer) and it’s only a couple of days old.
Google is the Grim Reaper of Acquisitions.
Imagine the amount of people that would switch if someone were to launch a good competitor right now.
I have been having problems with them for about a month now.
I have one site showing 300k readers, the count has increased by about 10k a day, when I actually have about 2k readers.
The other one was showing 0, this morning and I am getting the same errors as shown in the photo above.
The worst part about it is that you can’t contact them, you have to use a Google help group which is useless, as the only people who reply are the ones with problems.
Typical Google, take a company over, then change it so no one can contact them when there is a problem.
yup. same. on all of my blogs.
The problem is, to whom do you switch? FeedBurner offers such super-easy subscription tools, counts, email, etc.
Sad.
I lost over 200 subscribers in the transition to Google. That may not seem much, but my total was about 790, so that makes a 20+%.
yes, my blog aslo face the same problem, counter become 0 today, and i check with my friend online, he said he saw the number.
As I said when I emailed you guys, I haven’t found my stats resetting to zero (recently), but every day for the past week a substantial percentage of readers have, according to feedburner stats, stopped subscribing.
Maybe if you guys cleaned up your homepage a bit people would come to your site rather than read it through an RSS feed.
Spoken like someone who doesn’t use RSS.
@Daniel – you think ppl don’t come to TC because of its design?
lol
its about being efficient. when you follow 100+ blogs, you don’t have time to visit each and every single one of them.
Thanks so much for writing this post, Michael. It’s ridiculous what’s happened with Feedburner. Not only has it become extremely unreliable as a way to track subscriber numbers, but Google has been (to put it mildly) very unresponsive in responding to the problems on the forums, something the Feedburner people were great at before the acquisition. The “Known Issues” page is a joke. There will be a huge number of complaints about the same problem, and not only will there not be a response in the groups, but nothing on the known issues page.
It’s one thing for Google to give up on Lively or Notebook, but this is a service that tons of sites rely on for business. As many people have said, if you want to start a competitor, this would be the time.
Other recent issues:
FeedBurner’s FeedFlare was down for 24 hours around New Years.. and then down for *10 days* in early January.
FeedBurner counts have been wack for about 3 days now. Even though they weren’t zero, there were many reports of numbers down by about a third for the last few days. I checked mine and my feed with 17,500 subscribers was fine, but all the others were off. I looked into why.. and it’s because the Google Feedfetcher (i.e. Google Reader) numbers weren’t being included properly.. (and since GR is so popular, that’s a big deal)
So where do we go if they don’t get their act together?
That’s the problem with monopolies – they’ve got you by the short and curlies. What would happen if all a sudden they couldn’t care less?
It’d be hard to keep motivated when you’ve got $100 million in the bank…
Its a shame what Google have done. The service at Feedburner was excellent. There were some problems but all were minor. The last couple of days has been terrible. I hope they get it fixed.
RSS is heading closer towards mainstream adoption as more businesses begin to implement RSS feed subscriptions via their web sites. For 2008 the pace of RSS growth is set to accelerate for both consumer usage and business implementation. RSS is geared around segmentation, therefore, failing to offer subscribers options with their subscription or sending them information they didn’t sign up to receive will quickly lead businesses to RSS failure.
What if Google is Enron 2.0?
For shame! Google can do no evil. They say so right in their code of conduct
didn’t have subscribers count reset to 0, but lost 2 thirds of them, on all blogs.
what’s the point of buying a promising service if all you’re going to do is break it (feedburner), kill it (dodgeball), or releasing it on the public domain (jaiku). they could as well give away the money for free, it would have avoided all the hassle.
Tell me for which services Google is actually good in support????
Adwords.
Adwords is not a service, it’s their cashier system.
apart from the subscribers issue, feeds update very very slowly on google reader. the new feeds2.feedburner.com/yoursite url is fine, but most people are already subscribed to feeds.feedburner.com/yoursite and that one takes 7-36 hours to update.
at this point in time, feedburner is the snail mail of rss.
well done goog.
I guess they are goofing of with some changes in feed url.. and integration with google..
I noticed it changed to feed2.feedburner.com/ earlier it was feed.feedburner.com.. not sure if that is causing the problem..
I just gave up on rss readers, i get all the news updates i need from Twitter. TechCrunch news included
The problem is not you, but your readers.
Since pretty much nobody uses Twitter yet, that’d be 99.98% of most people’s audience.
This is absolutely it. Most of the comments above are of the “my reader count is low!” ilk, but you have to see it from the other side: your readers have been having problems accessing your site.
For months, if not years (if not ever since I realized many of my feeds were being piped through them), FeedBurner has been unreliable, unreachable, and downright broken. If feeds don’t update, we don’t visit your site because it doesn’t look like anything new has been published. The little icon in the corner with the number in it is the least of FeedBurner’s problems.
Very well said! I dumped blogger for similar reasons and Feedburner is just a good alternative away. I guess you can say I am glad I am not the only one.
Mine has been off by about 40k for the last 4 days… very irritating, I finally removed the widget.
Actually, what Google needs to let us do is allow site owners to combine their feeds together into a single URL. (actually replacing the current google reader or igoogle subscription with the updated feed URL).
Right now I have subscribers with feeds.feedburner.com, feeds2.feedburner.com, feedproxy.google.com, and feeds.howtogeek.com.
I have no way of updating the people still using the old feeds, so there’s no hope of ever switching away unless I want to lose about 45k out of 65k subscribers.
You can try yahoo pipes for that.
Try accessing the new “Feedproxy” API to get your subscriber stats, it always reports zero.
I didn’t want to use a chicklet so I’m not displaying any statistics.
Yeah I’ve noticed feeds updating VERY slowly since the switch from feedburner to google. Feedburner was always super quick in the past. Come on google, put some money on it and get it fixed. ALSO, plug up the holes so the people who are scamming the counter and making their site look bigger than it is actually show the true reader count.
I recently started revamping a newspaper’s website that used feedburner to display the posts on its companion blog. I quickly realized that the only thing stopping my website from loading instantly was the 5-6 second delays loading the feedburner feed.
So, I wrote a Rails plugin that parses the RSS feed, builds the HTML, and caches it for an hour. It takes 0.5-1 second to build the HTML, once an hour. I’m forbidden from publishing the code, but to anyone interested, look into the SimpleRSS gem. It’s pretty damn quick.
the same thing happerns to me
http://www.maes...odo-feedburner/
RE: Feedburner Needs To Get It Together {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/uvsEzueHiM_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”RE: Feedburner Needs To Get It Together ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/9NK2eA4O6o”}}}
Gabe Rivera of Techmeme mentioned a while back how feedburner slows your blog down from populating the Blogosphere… Personally I’ve dropped it and Google Blog Search loves me for it…
Why even bother with FeedBurner? Seriously.
You could implement a wordpress plugin that places a tracker gif in your posts just like FeedBurner, and tracks clickthroughs just like FeedBurner. There are a few attempts out there already (though interfaces are a little primitive).
Then you don’t rely on a 3rd party. Besides, with Google cutting services… who knows if feedburner is next. It doesn’t look like it’s revenue generating for them.
At the very least CNAME feedburner so you use your own subdomain and can drop them easier without having some users still rely on them.
I’ve got little sympathy for large sites using FeedBurner. You know the service isn’t great, you sign up… then you complain. You could build an alternative for not that much. Would make a pretty cool open source project.
Im up against a usual 2100 readers to ~400 readers – wow that does hurt, but not as much as techcrunch – landing to a royal Zero – i agree – GOoG needs to shape up or ship out.
I would jut like to have access to my feeds, i switched over to a google account with them and my feeds are missing, like its a brand new account.
I had the similar problem few months ago. My previous FeedBurner address was showing HTTP 404. But I thought, I was the only one having the issue and now seems like most of the people are having problem with FeedBurner.
you don’t pay for it, so you can’t complain. suck it up!
Feedburner/Google place ads and TC generates a few million PV a day via Feed.
They get paid extremely well for having TC on board.
Argh, I hate comments like yours, Emma. Don’t be an idiot.
If someone offers something for free, a) it doesn’t mean they’re not making money, and b) it doesn’t exempt them from providing good service.
Personally, I’d be happy to pay if it would ensure good service! But that’s not an option. Instead, no one is providing a worthwhile service in this space. Feedburner was doing it well until Google bought them out. Google has seriously dropped the ball; FB should be integrated with Google Analytics at this point. I’d pay for that in a heartbeat.
I’m having similar problems now. I thought things would get better once Google acquired feedburner, but nothing has changed.
Bring the OLD FeedBurner back – it worked, despite a few flaws. The recent transition to Google’s new platform has pretty much ruined a good service…..
Stop whining, you don’t lose any subscribers, the feeds are still delivered, only the counters don’t update properly …
Um. Part of the reason I created an FB account was to track subscribers. Why is it a problem to raise an issue about a service that is failing to work properly, and which the developers are ignoring?
I’m an author of Russian top rated web 2.0 blog http://www.internetno.net and we gone down from 11K readers to 4,6K. We think too that Google just kills this servive. But why?
Subscriber stats on Feedburner have been up and down like a yo-yo since moving my feeds over. It is almost to the point I have to wonder what the point is to have a feed burned by them. The stats are so inaccurate at this point that it is worthless. I started embedding a single 1×1 gif image and tracking that, and have had good results so far. It sure does not go up and down like Feedburners stats.
The only reason I chose not to use Feedburner for my new blog was that it was very cumbersome. I’ve decided to stick with the default feed which is faster than feedburner anyway.
http://stuckinf...es.blogspot.com
Blame Marcus
http://andasifb...rency-part-one/
The above complains are certainly true and I didn’t even see any mention that they have suspended their Feedfoundry product as well as access to the Feed Management API for new customers-
there are really very few feedburner people working on feedburner.
most of the feedburner folks got disseminated into other parts of google.
and the folks that are left don’t really work on improving the service.
Alternatives? Suggestions as to other ways to deal with this. Whining about google effing something ups does us all little good, if there is no solid choice of an alternative. Or suggestion as to other options.
Use Simplefeed.
Yes, you’ve gotta pay $$, but you can actually get an exec on the line and get a team moving if you have to.
Mark, thanks for the plug!
While it is true we answer the phone (and email), SimpleFeed serves enterprises with a $Xk a month offering.
We are grateful to FeedBurner for providing their service and educating the market. We share the collective dismay that these current issues are dimming the luster of feeds. While SimpleFeed may be the logical company to create a competitive free offering, in our experience, the revenue from advertising in feeds will not support the cost of an internet scale business. I suspect this is the issue with Google’s allocation of resources.
On the other hand, companies using a well designed and supported content syndication service to promote products and services are finding great value in feeds.
Feedburner service has been very reliable for me since I started using it back in 2007. I personally think it is one of the most feature-rich RSS management services available, although it is a little cluttered and confusing at first. More advertising opportunities for both Feedburner and my RSS feed would be great, and perhaps they need to invest more effort into improving the implementation of those features to benefit us and themselves.