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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

Why exactly do people like FeedBurner so much? What is it for that having an RSS feed on your blog doesn't do?

The only value I see (and why I use it), is so that I can track how many RSS readers I have.

Also interesting - RSS (for me anyways) converts really poorly. On 100,000 pageviews, I only pick up about 100 or so RSS subscribers.

RSS is only really useful as a conversation rate in communities. Take HN for example, it keeps you abreast of recent stories without having to open the page. In news sites, it's even more useful to scan the news. The conversation comes when users opt to partake in discussion.

That said, some sites do it badly, my personal experience of ARS Technica for example. I'll often see an interesting article I want to read, but then see something like "Read the other 52 paragraphs" and decide to come back later at which I never do. There's an art to creating feeds, almost like sales-people that excel at converting window shoppers into actual shoppers due to how they design their shop windows.

That happens when a blog doesn't have a well defined subject. It also happens if they aren't incentivized to go to the website, like when publishing articles in full I prefer my reader since it is consistent.

What I have found is that the few RSS subscribers I have are an excellent distribution channel on Twitter/HN/etc...

At one stage, FeedBurner subscriber counts acted a bit like a mega cheap circulation auditor. That is, if my blog said 25,000 subscribers, advertisers were likely to believe that number versus any stats I might produce myself. This was a pretty big deal for me at one point, though nowadays it's not that important at all.

RSS feeds -> email subscriptions. With Google branded signup and Google branded mail.

Yes. In 5 minutes, I have an email sign up form on a new WordPress install that delivers all the posts I make to all the subscribers via email.

Well, for one, Feedburner enables PubSubHubBub support, which is pretty key for RSS-centric infrastructure.

Setting up email subscription and delivery of your RSS feed is dead-simple in FeedBurner. That's a huge plus.

Also: If you don't own the keys to your CMS (see: newspaper-dot-coms), and your CMS changes (along with the URL to your RSS feeds), Feedburner allows you to keep your RSS subscribers.

Feedburner also helps ensure a good experience for the user while subscribing to the feed. Instead of showing a page of XML or requiring the user to configure an action in the browser/system to handle feeds, FeedBurner subscribe screens show a useful page for subscribing in whatever way the user wants (especially good for Google Reader and such).

It helped monetize your content. It provided metrics. It was pretty savvy about handling non-standard feeds. And it was reliable.

All valuable ideas for a stream based open web. Long live the open web!

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