Are there any competitors in this market left? What are the key functionalities people are looking for/going to miss from feedburner? Would people PAY for these tools?
- An easy way to offer email subscriptions (off by default with FeedBurner, but available on the Publish tab).
- Offloading RSS traffic to another server.
- Having a "portable" feed address. (If they change their domain or URL structure, they won't lose subscribers because they can just adjust the source feed in the feed service without affecting the public feed URL.)
MailChimp, Aweber, and the rest have replaced FeedBurner for email subscriptions for many because they offer more control over the HTML template, help build lists for other marketing efforts, and are generally better set up to guarantee delivery of email and report on opens and clickthrough rates.
That leaves feed count, traffic distribution, and portable feed addresses (plus whatever else you can come up with). I think there's potential for another service to cover these things because there are so few alternatives to FeedBurner. I'm not convinced that people would pay for it, though, but a free tier might encourage a few to give it a shot.
thanks for the thorough response. I wonder how profitable it would be if you charged say $5/year. guess its impossible to determine, because gizmodo or gadgt could sign up and destroy your average cost per user.
Tiered pricing is probably the only sane way to go for exactly the reason you suggest: big sites will use more resources.
FeedBlitz, perhaps the only real 'competitor' to FeedBurner at the moment, uses a tiered pricing model linked to the number of email subscribers you have. RSS subscribers are free. So that's one option. There will be others.
It's an easy way to get feed subscriber analytics and set up a podcast feed. Several big sites use Feedburner and it would seem crazy to shut it down. The landing page is a bit confusing because "Adsense for feeds" the service is still working but the blog, of the same name, was shut down.
