I trust it's OK in an RSS forum to post a link to Dave Winer's blog....

What if Feedburner closes?
08/03/2012 - by Dave Winer
[threads.scripting.com...]

It would be exceeding fair use to quote very much of Dave's comments, as it's a short post, but the essence is that Google is pulling back from the service, and if they do ultimately abandon it, he suggests two possible approaches.

One is something Google might do, to use 301s "to send traffic to the Feedburner version of your feed back to its original location."

The other is the "MyBrand" DNS subdomain approach, mentioned by bill above and referenced in the Dave Winer blog. MyBrand is discussed in this thread on WebmasterWorld...

Why submit RSS feeds to FeedBurner
Place feed on own website or burn in feedburner
http://www.webmasterworld.com/rss_atom/3851292.htm [webmasterworld.com]

Note that the link in the thread to the "MyBrand OverView and FAQ" is broken at Google's end. The technical aspects are described in this Google Feedburner FAQ....

MyBrand Tech Support FAQ
http://support.google.com/feedburner/answer/79586/ [support.google.com]

MyBrand lets you use CNAMEs to "create an alias at your domain so that you can "mask" your feed URL at FeedBurner."

A CNAME is web-speak for an alias or shortcut from one Internet name to another. It allows you to say "Send all of the traffic for feeds.yourdomain.com to feeds.feedburner.com."

I should add that when searching for [dave winer feedburner], which is how I came across his post, I've found several other blogs that discuss the situation. I'm taking the liberty of referencing a blog I've come to trust (that isn't referenced in the Dave Winer Feedburner post), which has some up to date comments on the situation...

Prepare for goodbye Feedburner in October 2012
Neville Hobson - September 9, 2012
[nevillehobson.com...]

Among other things, Hobson notes....

If you use WordPress, you can simply revert back to your blog’s native RSS feed (which will be the underlying source for the Feedburner feed).

An awesome post Robert Charlton.

It is somewhat reassuring to read the opinions of some in those linked articles/posts, that the disappearance of the API != the total demise of Feedburner.

It would still be nice to get someone at Google to respond to this in an official capacity, otherwise a lot of webmasters are going to start thinking of placing their feeds elsewhere. I primarily use Feedburner for the metrics it provides. Others use it for e-mail lists and other features. If this were to all go away we would appreciate some advance warning.

Much of our daily traffic comes via our daily rss feed.

Yet, when feedburner was created, the combination of email and rss set our hackles up and we banned Feedburner bots from our site.

When Feedburner was bought by Google, that confirmed we had made the wise choice.

This thread's news is double confirmation: Good riddance!

i don't think feedburner is dying any time soon.
google is surely interest in collecting information about content syndication.
by sundowning the feedburner api they are simply reducing the options for a webmaster or toolmaker wanting to access the data collected by google.

If you rely on such 3rd party services, you should make sure they don't leave you out in the rain and always use your own doamin name eg. by using the CNAME technique.

This also applies to Blogger, btw.

i don't think feedburner is dying any time soon.

It's already dead as far as Google is concerned.


1. Since Google Adsense made the final switch to the new interface earlier this year, there has been no way to turn on or off already existing Adsense for Feeds ad units.
They never built that feature into the new Adsense interface!

2. Remember That beautiful New Beta FeedBurner Dashboard? Yeah. It disappeared without any announcement sometime in December 2011.

Barry Schwartz writes about it on seroundtable.

Ever since Google bought FeedBurner I, and many others, have felt FeedBurner, as a service, has been slowly dying. Google proved us wrong yesterday when they announced a new beta version of the FeedBurner dashboard.
The new dashboard is hot, kinda looks like Google Analytics and so on.
Google said "the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens."
The new interface can be accessed at feedburner.google.com/gfb.

He also has some screenshots on the blog post. Go check it out if you've never seen it. It really was as beautiful as Google Analytics. What a shame!

Feedburner appears to have taken a change in direction when Twitter stopped allowing Google to reproduce the twitter stream. One of the Feedburner features was an automated "tweet your rss feed to twitter" which, of course, allowed Google to gather data about webmasters social profiles. Google removed the feature when they were shut out of twitter.

One of the Feedburner features was an automated "tweet your rss feed to twitter" which, of course, allowed Google to gather data about webmasters social profiles. Google removed the feature when they were shut out of twitter.

Do you know if TwitterFeed.com works? I'm signed up with them but never see any evidence of my feeds being tweeted. I've thought about killing the account but figured it wasn't doing any harm and might start working someday.

Yesterday, our Feedburner did not update. And today when you log in, it shows 0 subscribers to all our feeds. The feeds are still working, but looks like data is going away.

It's time to pack up and move

Do you know if TwitterFeed.com works?

i dont know about that one, but dlvr.it works okay. you can post them to facebook at the same time.

WTF! Feedburner counts are all 0. My subscribers emails are all gone.

Thank goodness I downloaded my 3 main email subscriber lists last week. 40,000 emails and 6 years building the list would of just disappeared.

Has Google addressed this?

Google removed the feature when they were shut out of twitter.

This is not true. I use this feature and it still works. Even now, when logging in to Feedburner shows 0 subscribers. I published a post, and it auto-tweeted the post

OK, it is still possible to download your subscribers.
Just set the date back a few day under Analyze --> Feed Stats then go to Publicize --> Subscription management.

I can also confirm that all of my FeedBurner feeds no longer show the number of subscribers. The feeds are still displayed, but statistics appear to be gone.

The FeedBurner Status Blog has a very minimal post acknowledging the issue: [feedburnerstatus.blogspot.jp...] Good to know they're working to resolve the issue, but it has been almost a week since I've had stats.

Time to look at alternatives I fear...

I too can agree on facing the same situation but I am just wondering how long will Google take to resolve the issue, just hope it starts functioning properly soon.

Well, my RSS feed stats are back in operation today. No word on the FeedBurner Status Blog, but it's good to have those back.