My Feedburner Concerns
Thursday, November 20th, 2008Before you read this post, you might want to know a little bit more about subscribing and rss so that you can keep things in context! Got it? Great.
Feedburner is a tool that many bloggers (including myself) use to:
a) Provide blog readers with an rss feed of their posts
b) Track their rss subscription statistics (ie: how many people are subscribed to their blog)
Without a doubt it’s a decent tool, but here’s the problem: it’s not terribly reliable. Just check out a screenshot of my supposed subscription stats over the last couple of weeks:
Feedburner Stats
These stats lead me to believe one of two things:
1) I have extremely fickle blog readers and lost 10% of them one day and gain back 15% the next day (not to mention on some days all of them stop subscribing and then the number jumps back up the next day)
2) The numbers aren’t accurate
Neither a terribly good conclusion to draw, and I’m even more incredulous at this because Feedburner has been owned by Google since 2007. Given the great stats provided by Google Analytics, why has nothing been done to increase accuracy with Feedburner after almost 18 months?
But besides the fact that inaccuracy bugs me (and many people on Twitter), there is a bigger issue. Remember point a? That Feedburner actually provides the link for readers to subscribe? That’s what scares me. Should Google decide tomorrow that Feedburner isn’t worth what they paid for it and shut it down or leave it to die, means that all our blog readers will be pointed to a metaphorical dead end. And given the lack of innovation and current state of affairs, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if that were to happen eventually.
I know when I switched rss feeds from the old blog to this I lost a lot of readers and traffic, but that was my choice. I would certainly hate for it to happen because of poor maintenance or a poor business decision in 2007. Do you worry about this? Does it bug you that your stats aren’t accurate? Be heard!
Tags: bloggers, feedburner, feedburner reliability, Google, migrating rss feeds, rss feeds, rss statistics
