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address where you could contact a Google employee to manually migrate your account (since then, the email address has been replaced by a form).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. }