Is FeedBurner’s candle dimming?
FeedBurner, the service cofounded by Dick Costolo, seems to be getting a hard time from commentators on the web right now (actually, it’s been taking flak for quite some time now but I won’t go into that. It seems that the $100 million investment by search giant Google has been left hanging in the wind and the recent departure of Costolo to pastures greener (aka Twitter) doesn’t seem to have helped matters either - “FeedBurner is dead!” say the experts.
So, why all the grumbling? For a start, there’s the lack of integration with some of the amazingly powerful tools offered by the big G - Analytics; probably one of the best web analysis tools going right now but still no hooks into FeedBurner. Sure, we all know that integration takes time but Google bought FeedBurner back in 2007 which has given them ample time to get the work done.
The next big grumble comes from ad revenue; Google has integrated adsense into FB allowing you displaying pretty little ad boxes on your feeds. The problem is that the revenue derived from this feature is truly appalling. One commentator quoted a site making $200 every 1,000,000 impressions! You won’t be paying your debts off with kind return, let alone running a business based on ad revenue.
The original idea was that FeedBurner’s powerful set of RSS tools would be merged with Google’s infrastructure providing users with an incredibly powerful extension to the already awesome array of analytical tools available. Had this have happened everybody would have been happy: killer marketing tools for online businesses and a healthy revenue stream coming from Adwords straight into G’s very large wallet!
All well and good but, for some reason, this simply hasn’t worked out. And, with the departure of Costolo to Twitter, it looks unlikely to happen anytime soon. Ask any good techie and he’ll almost certainly tell you that integration is one of the hardest jobs going but, even if it is only one step at a time, Google needs to fix this. The highest priority for many webmasters is stats. After actual readers, stats are the lifeblood of any website (how did we get by in the days before search engines?) are need to fixed fast. The danger for Google lies in FeedBurners competition; there are plenty of sites out there that offer similar, and better services, than those seen on FeedBurner. If the search giant starts to lose ground in the distribution of RSS feeds how long will it be before competing sites start to build more, and better, functionality that eats into Googles core revenue generator? It will certainly be interesting to see if Twitter takes up the baton under the steely eyed guidance of Costolo!
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