20 replies to this topic

[bwelford]

You may have woken up this morning to realize that Feedburner was showing 0 subscribers for any blog you may have. Google who owns Feedburner seems to be offering no support and will be cutting the API in October. Was this an early (and unannounced) withdrawal of service.

Apparently not, according to the Feedburner blog.
http://feedburnersta...-and-stats.html

This reads as follows:

Known Issue: Subscriber Counts and Stats
Friday, September 21, 2012 | 9:26 AM
Issue: We have been encountering difficulties with our stats production pipeline for data representing Sept 19th and 20th, 2012. We are currently working to resolve the issue.

Even so, perhaps it's time to start worrying.

[DonnaFontenot]

I got so frustrated with feedburner stats occasionally zeroing out, or just flat out changing drastically from one day to the next, that I dumped it - a long time ago. It's been a couple of years at least, I think, since I got rid of it and just use the regular built-in rss from wordpress, plus feedblitz for email subscriptions. I figured if the stats weren't right, there was no point in having stats at all. So, bye-bye.

[EGOL]

hmm.... I have been using Feedburner for about 6 years and have thousands of RSS and email subscribers. The subscriber count jumps up and down a lot but today is the first day that I noticed zeros. I really like the service.

If they are shutting down the API, I wonder if the RSS and email service are going to disappear soon?

[iamlost]

Just a little dig at oblivious webdevs (not that there are any of those at Cre8, of course )... whenever you utilise a service - such a s Feedburner - you really need to pay attention to what is happening , or not, with it. Why? Because it may change cost or features or even go out of business...

Feedburner was officially deprecated back on 26-May-2011 (over a year ago), without a scheduled termination date.

The Feedburner AdSense for Feeds blog and Twitter account were closed 26-July-2012.

The official final shutdown 'announcement' was 09-September-2012.
What is curious and rather foolish, on the part of Google, is that the only 'official' (so far as I know) comment was adding the following at the top of the FeedBurner developer page:

Important: The Google Feedburner APIs have been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011 will be shut down on October 20, 2012.

I guess if you couldn't take a series of 'hints' you really didn't deserve to know...

[cre8pc]

Well that sucks! I have 7 sites using Feedburner and all are now set to ZERO.





A freakin' email to their users would been nice.

Signed,
I'm Not A Mind Reader and Too Busy for Hints

[cre8pc]

Soooo...it's dead. I see more tweets on this.

What alternatives to Feedburner's RSS feeds and email subscriptions can we recommend to everyone?

[DonnaFontenot]

WordPress handles RSS feeds all by itself just fine. (You don't get that cute little "count" though).

Feedblitz is the best alternative I've found for email subscriptions.

[cre8pc]

Update!

Update from John Mueller from Google - "5:09 PM
It's still up and running - the counts are being worked on. We use it on all our blogs as well :-)?"

[AbleReach]

I hope John Mueller is right! When the Feedburner subscriber count is zero I can't see the email addresses of hundreds of email rss subscribers I'd like to migrate to another service before Feedburner is completely gone. If they're being "worked on" I'd like the peace of mind of at least knowing I have backed up my subscriber email lists.

[cre8pc]

I agree Liz. I posted a question about this in Google Plus for John. Hopefully he can help.

[EGOL]

You know that lots and lots of people subscribe to Google content through Feedburner. So if Google cuts off support for Feedburner they will have to move all of their subscribers to a new service.

For example, the Adsense blog has over 100,000 subscribers. Their chicklet shows a zero today too. http://adsense.blogspot.com/

Although my count is at zero, my email messages are still going out. So the problem, I believe is confined to the count and not the entire service.

Edited by EGOL, 23 September 2012 - 10:08 AM.

[bwelford]

You can still see your subscribers' e-mail addresses and it does say you can export a CSV file. I haven't had time to do that yet.

[AbleReach]

Bwelford, where do feedburner subscriber email addresses show up when the feed subscriber count is at zero? I'm not seeing it on any screens or in the csv export.

[bwelford]

If you go to your Feedburner account, you first click on the particular feed you wish to check. This opens a series of tabs so open the Promote tab. There you will find one link to Email subscriptions. At the bottom of that page there is a link to Subscriber details and you can export a CSV file of those.

[rustybrick]

They are back now.

[bwelford]

... the worrying question is for how long. They are pitiful in the information they provide to the world. Will they be disappearing again in mid October? Who knows? If anyone does, they don't seem to be telling us? Perhaps it's all linked to an unknown date when Google pulls some plug or other.

[jonbey]

I used to use Feedburner but when I found out that people were using it to publish my blogs to their own blogspot blogs I mostly abandoned it. Certainly not looked in a long time.

Was it really that useful? OK, I have no idea now if anyone follows any of my site's feeds. I decided it was better to try to encourage people to sign up to the newsletter or social pages instead.

[EGOL]

Was it really that useful?

It works really well for me. About 8000 people get my feed through email and my chicklet shows over 9000 "readers". I don't have to do any extra work to communicate with these people.... the just click a link on my site to sign-up.

[iamlost]

I find it darkly amusing that some folks seem able to believe Google when they say FeedBurner APIs will be shut down 20-October-2012 yet believe that the base 'service' will continue indefinitely unaffected especially after various support services have already been closed. And they can't even keep that base service up and running.

Given that the only real 'service' that many/most webdevs receive from FeedBurner is user stats (and these are as inaccurate as all other free Google stats) ... inertia, a social proof...

But then I do not understand outsourcing analytics data in the first place.

[EGOL]

I find it darkly amusing that some folks seem able to believe Google when they say FeedBurner APIs will be shut down 20-October-2012 yet believe that the base 'service' will continue indefinitely...

I know that it will disappear one day.... but it is working really well for me.. And, as long as its working... I'll think about that tomorrow.

When Google bought Feedburner I decided that it was good for them to have my data. If they used that data as a ranking factor it might be good to have a blog with a growing list of subscribers.