David
Jackson, who is the author of The Internet Stock Blog (as well as a series of
other blogs on investing and technology), was kind enough to add me to his
recommended VC blog list. As part of our
exchange about this I noticed that he hadn’t ‘burned’ his feeds through
Feedburner (which is a Mobius backed company). I asked him why he hadn't done this and he replied with some really good questions about their service. I thought I would
reprint them here, along with my responses with the idea that if David, as a
sophisticated blogger, had these questions other people probably do as well.
I've resisted using Feedburner, because:
1. It's not clear to me how to migrate my current RSS
feeds to them (without asking everyone to re-subscribe)
2. The company's web site gives very little information
about the service
3. I'm nervous entrusting my RSS feed to a company
that might try to monetize it in future in ways I don't want
4. I expect that Google's RSS ads will end up
providing fairly rich stats about the RSS feeds anyway
Here’s
my response (actually in two e-mails, which I’ve combined here):
1. If you have
control over the http directives on your site you can burn your feed without
any change to your subscribers. See this
post from the Feedburner forum http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=3.
2. I totally agree - their site pretty much
sucks. I expect this will take some time
to change, but they're starting to hire up (they were 5 guys when we made our
investment - we're up to 10 and growing).
3. I get the concern, but can tell you that they
absolutely won't do anything to your feed that you don't request. Here's Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo's post on
the financing that talks about their business model - http://feeds.feedburner.com/BurnThisRSS2?m=68. They are going to make money by managing
feeds, by offering premium statistics and by taking a cut of ads in feeds (but
ads will only be inserted in feeds that sign up for them).
4. Google stats I think will only provide you stats on
the ads themselves, not the feeds. FB's
total stats pro package provides pretty in depth info on what people are
reading and where they are coming from (you can trial this package on their
site). Also with Google ads you have to
have edit the source template, which is a pain (and something not everyone is
able to do) and also means that you have to insert feeds into all of your posts
(given the way most readers work, FB generally only inserts feeds in a portion
of feeds to keep the content to ad ratio reasonable).
Don’t know if I convinced David to move over to
Feedburner or not, but he knows I’ll keep on him . . .
UPDATE: I received a trackback ping from Dadu Mimram writing on Strategic Board Blg - a great perspective from a Feedburner user and much more eloquent than my original post. See Dadu's post here.
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