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3 things FeedBurner needs to improve

Published by Rob Thomas | July 31st 2009 | Views:

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If you don't know what FeedBurner is, then you're most probably living on Mars. The service was launched three years ago, in 2004 and its purpose was to replace the regular feed management procedure for blogs and websites. As time passed, FeedBurner evolved from this to what you can see and test right now.

"The spark for syndication success" actually turned out to be a huge success as Google bought the service for a price around 100 million dollars. Since they're currently working on improving the features and the overall quality of FeedBurner, I thought this would be the best time to share my opinion on the matter.

In order to make FeedBurner more user oriented, I believe it needs at least 3 simple tweaks, described below:

1. Total readers instead of active readers
You all know the Feedburner badge that counts the readers subscribed to your website. Have you seen it fluctuating very much, especially on week-ends? Then you must also know that FeedBurner counts and displays only ACTIVE feed subscribers (e.g just the ones that read your feed in the previous day). IDLING subscribers (those that did not view your feeds) are not shown, though they're still subscribed to your website.

Week-ends are low feed count days because of the large number of persons accessing the internet (including the feed reader) from
work. It might sound stupid, but it's absolutely true.

All in all, this is very misleading, omorrow. What if that person unsubscribes by the time the stats gets it's updates? What's the use of the professional status and analyzing tools if I cannot see nor determine what article made the user subscribe for more and why exactly he might have decided to unsubscribe and leave the website?

My above example reflects a situation involving a single user. What if your website gets tagged over various social networking websites? By the time your stats are updated, the amount of traffic/users will be very diminished and you won't get to see the full potential of the website.

If not in real time, at least on lower intervals (e.g every hour) a change would be very much welcome and I know you're with me on this one. It would make a huge difference, even if the process consumes some extra computing power.

3. Detailed requirements to join the FeedBurner Ad Network
In case you were not aware of this, FeedBurner offers monetization opportunities via the feeds. Login to your FeedBurner account and press Monetize. You will then be hit with a cold informational message. Quoting the most important part from it:

If your feed is well-subscribed and updated regularly, and you would like to learn more about joining FAN, send email to publishers@feedburner.com; we'll get right back to you with details.
Here are our tips for a speedier path to FAN participation:
* Increase your subscribership. Building a larger audience for your site and/or podcast is the surest path to success with commercial advertising.
* Offer content in channels that have a more select group of publishers. More detail on channels coming very soon!

So how well is well-subscribed? You won't get this information even if you send an e-mail and ask. I always liked the way AdSense separates regular publishers from premium ones. Now since FeedBurner is the property of Google, a good separation should be in place for feeds too. I only have 20 subscribers on my RSS feed. So what? This means I won't be winning tons of money. Why not let me apply since FB has nothing to lose? AdSense has no restrictions from this point of view. If you still want restrictions, make a Premium Feed Advertising service for sites like TechCrunch and Engadget. Or simply let us embed an AdSense code within the feeds.

I'd think this should make everyone happy. As a parallel to this, FeedBurner offers the possibility of sending updates via e-mail and also offers a subscribe form based on a verifiable e-mail address. I know someone that started subscribing with many of his e-mail addresses (created on purpose of course) in order to achieve the required number of subscribed users, whatever that is.

It would be a win-win situation if we knew more about this, or our access won't be so limited even if we have newly established websites, or even if we don't have enough readers in our feed. I'm sure most of you agree with me on this one too.

Please don't take this as a complaint. FeedBurner is a great service as it is, but since there's always room for improvement, I figured out it's time to make a list of what needs changing. Let's spread this around and perhaps it will reach the proper people. Since you're reading, feel free to make your own additions to the list ;)
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