DISQUS

Peter Cooper · 8 months ago

I was in a position to get into this market quite quickly (I ran a company called Feed Digest but sold it two years ago) at one stage. I figured I should explain why I didn't, perhaps these reasons are shared by others.

Firstly, it's a thankless task. FeedBurner has become essential to many, but people feel unaware of that when it just works. Most people also expect these services to be free or very cheap.

Secondly, it's an important task. If you have occasional bursts of downtime, people go NUTS! Even with Feed Digest, people went crazy if it went down for 10 minutes one time. This is high availability land, along with the grossly enlarged requirements and demands that makes upon all of your resources. Building high availability systems is not necessarily hard, from an architectural point of view, but it's very demanding. Couple demanding with "not much money" and you see the issue.

There are a few other issues, but those were the biggies for me.

Ed Richardson · 8 months ago

I can imagine they are the major issues of anyone trying to establish themselves in the market.

The advantage for the likes of Google et al, would be they already have the infrastructure in place to support a large implementation/product like FeedBurner.

Charging for anything other than the very basic offering I suppose would assist with overheads, but as you say, the likes of me that run non-commercial blogs can't really afford to foot anything other than a minor costs, although it could be seen as an investment.

Sale of additional metrics to third parties I suppose could generate further revenues, but I suspect establishing a foot hold in that market is more tricky.

Thanks for the insight Peter.

It's easy to identify there being a hole in this specific market, but identifying why, isn't always as straight forward.

Shamus · 8 months ago

Hear, hear. Definitely one of the more untapped markets online. Of course, being online, 'large' and 'market' does not mean 'profitable' unless you're mining for personal usage habits, i.e. Google with loss-leader YouTube (and FeedBurner, no doubt).

Ed Richardson · 8 months ago

It just seems strange that in a market that can't produce enough Twitter applications to save itself, that there aren't more competitors out there in the RSS stream management market.

I've yet to make a jump to any new provider, but I'll likely make a decision in the next few weeks and at the moment I'm waiting for PostRank to convince me to choose them, otherwise I could either way, FeedBurner or FeedBlitz.

Whilst the numbers on Twitter are now impressive, the blog market is still a vast array of metrics. Not only that, but I would bet my bottom dollar that a blog follower is more targeted and should therefore be more valuable asset.

Let's see what happens when the Twitter frenzy eases.

Cheers for the comment Shamus.

PostRank · 8 months ago

Hi Ed,

While it's true that we do show pretty comprehensive data, we haven't actually launched an analytics offering yet, a la FeedBurner or anyone else.

The Analytics Beta info page is here: http://www.postrank.com/publishers/analytics

In fact, we recently posted a survey to help us pinpoint features to best serve the user base: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=nvNS9CK3Q...

(Feel free to chime in!)

Melanie

Ed Richardson · 8 months ago

Hi Melanie,

Yes, I signed up for the analytics beta, I really like what data you show and hope that PageRank can go on to offer an alternative to FeedBurner and the likes of Feed Blitz.

I'm going to spend some time exploring PageRank, because what I've seen so far has impressed.

Thanks for the comment.

gausarts · 6 months ago

I need to change from feedburner and found the info here. Very useful. Thanks.

Ed Richardson · 6 months ago

No problem, glad to be of some use.

I recently moved over to the new FeedBurner, I'm going to give it a few months and see how it goes as I'm very busy trying to sort other things on Digital Signals at the moment.

If I'm not happy then, I'll take the leap and likely go with FeedBlitz unless PostRank start to offer something more substantial as an alternative.

Thanks for the comment!

marcoatorresm · 3 weeks ago

This is a very good thought-provoking article. Congrats!!!