It shouldn't be a surprise that Google is planning on shutting down it's feed management system, Feedburner. Considering the fact that RSS news feeds are being used less and less as social media is now the new form of news gathering, news feeds are now used mostly by us dinosaurs.
This could be bad news for bloggers and businesses that have leaned heavily on getting return traffic from an RSS subscription base. And the change has forced the hand of many to find a different solution to managing their feed.
But this leads us to the question...What's next?
Here are 3 options to replacing the soon-to-be defunct feedburner service...
Option #1 Use Your Native Feed Source.
To be fair, there is very little difference between who services your RSS subscription. And to be real honest, aside from the option to monetize the feed itself, the ability to know (somewhat) how many people are tuning in (via a reader), and the credibility factor of displaying to the world your vast awesomeness with a large readership through a badge, the value of an RSS subscription feed is not much.
That said, if you are using WordPress, you really don't need a service. WordPress automatically generates feeds for everything from comments to pages to posts (also known as a native feed). Generally, the url looks something like this:
https://yoursite.com/feed
Rather than pointing your feed to a external source, you can simply keep it in house.
If you have been using feedburner to syndicate your content, you will probably need to inform your readership that you are making the switch with instructions on what they need to do in order to stay with you.
Option #2 Find A New Rss Subscription Syndication Service
You can also migrate to a different RSS subscription manager. Website services such as Feedblitz are popular options. You will get the same data that you got from feedburner PLUS a ton of other data and it gives you ability to broadcast via email. The downside? You pay for it.
Option #3 Build A List And Use The List To Promote Your Website
The final option is to actually forgo a feed reader altogether and instead promote an email subscription for your readership. From an analytics point of view, you will gain far more data as to who is reading (and who isn't) as you can see who opens your email and who doesn't.
Some list services actually gives you more details about those reading your stuff, such as Facebook and Twitter profiles!
The other upside to this is control. You can choose to send automatic updates to readers or specially tailor an article alert to include other things.
The obvious downside is that fewer may subscribe to your list than they would a reader. Another downside is that you may have to create a front end reward for them signing up.
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I for one use RSS feeds as a way to keep up with all the blogs and sites I want to follow. It is a real time saver when wanting to see all the latest posts/articles by my favourite sites. BTW: I saw this article because I follow Search Engine People via RSS feed. (wink)
Also, the social networks are so busy (it’s 11:30 p.m. Pacific Time here and the posts are still streaming in my TweetDeck) that your announcement of your article or post gets lost in the stream or missed all together if the follower isn’t online when you post.
If Search Engine People (or anyone else) moves away from Feedburner, please figure out how to do a redirect to your new RSS feed or announce your move in plenty of time for readers to change the url. My RSS feedreader will put a big old X beside your name if it can’t find the feed. If you are in one of my quieter folders I might not notice the failure and just think you have gone quiet.
I still use RSS feeds. What they offer over social media and mailing lists is I can organize them into their respective interests. With social media, Facebook for instance, updates are just random at best and with their new promote a post system, products I like can buy their way onto my front page and push out the news sites I want to read. With an email list if I don’t feel like reading the update right now it’s going to get lost with all my other emails. With my RSS feed when I want news, or have a few minutes of free time to relax, what I want is there waiting for me. I hope the closing of feedburner doesn’t turn people away from RSS.
You say Google is shutting down it’s Feedburner service yet the link you give is to the API which is completely different.
You can no longer tap into the service to get out subscriber numbers but as far as I know there hasn’t been an announcement that the entire service is to be shut down.
What are your thoughts about WordPress.com feed service?
I am definitely in favor of building a list over RSS subscribers, Leo; no question about it.
I knew this was coming, but hate adding yet another to-do bullet – change RSS feed links.
Finally somebody has said it … use the feed off your WordPress posts. I think this is the way I am going to go forward and build a list using my autoresponder service. I use RSS feeds to build links as well so not need for Feedburner for that, so why not just use your native feed?? Good article, thanks