Blog Design Studio

Alright! Looks like the rant time is back in blogosphere and I’m joining the party against feedburner, that has given very pathetic service lately. Over a period of time, the service of Feedburner has gone down the hill and there are many bloggers like Jean-Baptiste Jung, Jeff who are frustrated that they don’t get to know the exact number of the feeds. Although, Jeff has asked the question that if Feed subscriber count is of any use in these times or not?

1400 subscribers! Yipieee!

I would be honest, its been some time since I checked our subscriber base and the core reason was that Feedburner had been acting stupid, although I know that its been hovering around 1400 since some time. It’s helpful that I have the rough idea, however its difficult to digest that a service, owned by Google has been failing to provide good and dependable results. Many bloggers aren’t happy, some have accepted the service as it still gives a rough idea although on the other side some have shown a decline in interest as in current scenario there are other ways through which visitors can subscribe to their content. These days, most of the bloggers are  focusing towards either email marketing or towards increasing the twitter or facebook fans.

What are the alternatives?

Feedburner has been a great service and one of the only service that gives you the stats, helps you make money through Adsense and doesn’t charge a single dime. They offer so many features that others have failed to offer till date, however its the inconsistency in the service that made Jean & Samir Bhardwaj to look for alteratives. These are some of the alternatives that I liked -

• Feedblitz – This is definitely second most popular service. Feedblitz is very stable and has got good reviews lately. It is popularly praised for its email newsletter service and looks like a pretty good alternative to Feedburner. It comes at a price although, it shouldn’t be an issue for professional bloggers if they are still interested in RSS stats.
• WP FeedStats – This is a free WordPress plugin that displays the RSS subscription stats of your blog. The plugin displays the hits all the versions of the feed, be it RSS2, RSS or ATOM. The plugin looks decent I haven’t checked it personally, however, if we go by Samir’s judgement then it shouldn’t be a bad alternative to those looking for a free solution.
• Aweber & MailChimp – These two email subscription delivery services have gained a major chunk of market share as more and more bloggers have realized that email subscription is still best suited for marketing and advertisement for subscription. These email subscription tools offer great features and are at par with rss subscription services.

It’s pretty strange to see that there are hardly any decent alternatives to feedburner and probably one of the reason, why Google isn’t putting the heart and soul towards the service as much they’ve been doing for various other properties. And one of the reasons we don’t see many alternatives is because services like Facebook and Twitter have acted as a source of stats as well as good amount of traffic. What are your thoughts about the same? Do you think if feeds are relevant anymore or not?