FeedBurner

Last updated
Feedburner, Inc.
Google Feedburner logo.png
Type of business Subsidiary
Type of site
Web feed management
Parent Google
URL feedburner.google.com
LaunchedFebruary 29, 2004;19 years ago (2004-02-29)
Current statusActive

Feedburner, Inc. is a web feed management service primarily for monetizing RSS feeds, primarily by inserting targeted advertisements into them. It was founded in 2004 [1] and acquired by Google in 2007.

Contents

Services

Services provided to publishers include traffic analysis [2] and an optional advertising system. Though it initially was not clear whether advertising would be well-suited to the RSS format, [3] authors now choose to include advertising in two-thirds of FeedBurner's feeds. [4] Users can find out how many people have subscribed to their feeds and with what service/program they subscribed.

Feedburner replaces an ordinary RSS feed by a modified feed; the original feed becomes a private feed that only Feedburner can access. Apart from advertising, published feeds are modified in several ways, including automatic links to Digg and del.icio.us, and "splicing" information from multiple feeds. [5] FeedBurner originally offered application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow other software to interact with it, but as of October 2012 no longer does. As of August 4, 2008 (the last time statistics were released), FeedBurner hosted 1,993,406 feeds for 1,125,264 publishers, including 249,728 podcast and videocast feeds. [6] [7]

History

FeedBurner was founded in 2004 by Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski, and Matt Shobe. The four founders were consultants together at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). [1]

On June 3, 2007, FeedBurner was acquired by Google for a rumored price of $100 million. [8] One month later, two of their popular "Pro" services (MyBrand and TotalStats) were made free to all users. [9]

On May 26, 2011, Google announced that the FeedBurner APIs were deprecated. [10] Google shut down the APIs on October 20, 2012. [11]

Google terminated AdSense for Feeds on October 2, 2012 and shut it down on December 3, 2012. [12]

On April 14, 2021, Google announced they would migrate FeedBurner to new infrastructure but remove "non-core" functionality including email subscriptions, browser-friendly viewing, and password-protection. [13] This was originally scheduled for July 2021 but did not occur until July 2022. [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">RSS</span> Family of web feed formats

RSS is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitor sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them. News aggregators can be built into a browser, installed on a desktop computer, or installed on a mobile device.

Web syndication is making content available from one website to other sites. Most commonly, websites are made available to provide either summaries or full renditions of a website's recently added content. The term may also describe other kinds of content licensing for reuse.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atom (web standard)</span> Web standards

The name Atom applies to a pair of related Web standards. The Atom Syndication Format is an XML language used for web feeds, while the Atom Publishing Protocol is a simple HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating web resources.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xanga</span> Website extincted in 2013

Xanga was a website that hosted weblogs, photoblogs, and social networking profiles. It was operated by Xanga.com, Inc. and based in New York City.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web feed</span> Data format

On the World Wide Web, a web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe a channel to it by adding the feed resource address to a news aggregator client. Users typically subscribe to a feed by manually entering the URL of a feed or clicking a link in a web browser or by dragging the link from the web browser to the aggregator, thus "RSS and Atom files provide news updates from a website in a simple form for your computer."

Google AdSense is a program run by Google through which website publishers in the Google Network of content sites serve text, images, video, or interactive media advertisements that are targeted to the site content and audience. These advertisements are administered, sorted, and maintained by Google. They can generate revenue on either a per-click or per-impression basis. Google beta-tested a cost-per-action service, but discontinued it in October 2008 in favor of a DoubleClick offering. In Q1 2014, Google earned US$3.4 billion, or 22% of total revenue, through Google AdSense. AdSense is a participant in the AdChoices program, so AdSense ads typically include the triangle-shaped AdChoices icon. This program also operates on HTTP cookies. In 2021, over 38.3 million websites use AdSense.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web 2.0</span> World Wide Web sites that use technology beyond the static pages of earlier Web sites

Web 2.0 refers to websites that emphasize user-generated content, ease of use, participatory culture and interoperability for end users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bloglines</span>

Bloglines was a web-based news aggregator for reading syndicated feeds using the RSS and Atom formats. Users could subscribe to the syndicated feeds for free using a web browser. Bloglines offered an application programming interface that maintainers of web sites could use to write software to read feeds, search its database of feed entries, and ping the service when a website was updated. Bloglines became unavailable in early 2015.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">News aggregator</span> Client software that aggregates syndicated web content

In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital content such as online newspapers, blogs, podcasts, and video blogs (vlogs) in one location for easy viewing. The updates distributed may include journal tables of contents, podcasts, videos, and news items.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Reader</span> Defunct RSS/Atom feed aggregator formerly operated by Google

Google Reader is a discontinued RSS/Atom feed aggregator operated by Google. It was created in early 2005 by Google engineer Chris Wetherell and launched on October 7, 2005, through Google Labs. Google Reader grew in popularity to support a number of programs which used it as a platform for serving news and information to users. Google shut down Google Reader on July 1, 2013, citing declining use.

In blogging, a ping is an XML-RPC-based push mechanism by which a weblog notifies a server that its content has been updated. An XML-RPC signal is sent from the weblog to one or more Ping servers, as specified by originating weblog), to notify a list of their "Services" of new content on the weblog.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Blog Search</span> Blog search engine

Google Blog Search was a specialized service of Google used to search blogs. It was discontinued in May 2011. The Blog Search was "the first major search engine to offer full-blown blog and feed search capabilities". It was released in 2005. The bots appeared to be faster than the standard Googlebot, because updates to blogs often become available within hours instead of weeks taken by Googlebot default. The Blog Search searches were done identically to the Google Search by typing your search terms in the search field and seeing the most relevant results related to the topic. The Blog Search looked at various services in the world of blogs like Blogger, LiveJournal, and Weblog. For some time it was possible to force Google to access and search the Blogsearch database by manually formatting the URL in your browser's address bar. But in March 2016, Google also took away this access.

GeoRSS is a specification for encoding location as part of a Web feed. (Web feeds are used to describe feeds of content, such as news articles, Audio blogs, video blogs and text blog entries. These web feeds are rendered by programs such as aggregators and web browsers.) The name "GeoRSS" is derived from RSS, the most known Web feed and syndication format.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jaiku</span> Company

Jaiku was a social networking, micro-blogging and lifestreaming service comparable to Twitter, founded a month before the latter. Jaiku was founded in February 2006 by Jyri Engeström and Petteri Koponen from Finland and launched in July of that year. It was purchased by Google on October 9, 2007.

Social network aggregation is the process of collecting content from multiple social network services into a unified presentation. Examples of social network aggregators include Hootsuite or FriendFeed, which may pull together information into a single location or help a user consolidate multiple social networking profiles into a single profile.

FriendFeed was a real-time feed aggregator that consolidated updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and microblogging updates, as well as any type of RSS/Atom feed. It was created in 2007 by Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh. It was possible to use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share, as well as originate new posts-discussions, with friends. Friendfeed was built on top of Tornado. The service was shut down at about 21:00 GMT on April 10, 2015, though the service blog announced it a month before.

Simple Update Protocol, or SUP, is a protocol developed by FriendFeed to simplify and speed up RSS and Atom feed updates. Updates from services that supported the protocol would appear on FriendFeed within seconds, until support was dropped. These sites include Disqus, Identi.ca, reddit.

The Old Reader is a web-based news aggregator that delivers website, blog, and other Internet content to a web-based inbox. The service sprang up when Google removed social features from Google Reader; the site supports social media sharing, including the ability to "like" content, and find friends via social media networks.

Google URL Shortener, also known as goo.gl, was a URL shortening service owned by Google. It was launched in December 2009, initially used for Google Toolbar and Feedburner. The company launched a separate website, goo.gl, in September 2010.

References

  1. 1 2 Wolinsky, Howard (2005-09-06). "Helping Publishers, Bloggers Get the Word Out". Chicago Sun-Times . Archived from the original on 2006-03-17. Retrieved 2019-01-24.
  2. "Mining For Data In Blogs". TechWeb. 2006-07-17. Archived from the original on July 20, 2006. Retrieved 2006-08-10.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  3. "Advertisers Muscle Into RSS". Wired News. 2004-11-18. Archived from the original on 2008-07-24. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
  4. "FeedBurner buys BlogBeat, expanding blog analysis". Reuters. 2006-07-17. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
  5. "The Feed Thickens". Flickr. 2004-07-14. Archived from the original on 2007-06-04. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
  6. "FeedBurner". Archived from the original on 2008-09-19. Retrieved 2008-09-19.
  7. "About FeedBurner". FeedBurner.com. Archived from the original on 2009-02-14. Retrieved 2009-02-14.
  8. "Techcrunch confirms Google buyout of FeedBurner".
  9. "FreeBurner for Everyone". FeedBurner. Archived from the original on February 16, 2009. Retrieved 2007-10-27. Beginning today, two of FeedBurner's previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free.
  10. "Spring cleaning for some of our APIs". Google Code. Retrieved 2011-05-27. These APIs are now deprecated but have no scheduled shutdown date: Code Search API, Diacritize API, Feedburner APIs, Finance API, Power Meter API, Sidewiki API, Wave API.
  11. "FeedBurner API (Deprecated)". Google Inc. Archived from the original on May 5, 2012. Retrieved 2012-09-11. Important: The Google Feedburner APIs have been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011 will be shut down on October 20, 2012.
  12. "Continues: Google Kills AdSense For Feeds". TechCrunch. September 28, 2012. Retrieved September 29, 2012.
  13. "Upcoming changes to FeedBurner in July 2021 - Feedburner Help". Feedburner Help. Retrieved 2021-04-14.
  14. "feedburner over the limit problem". Feedburner Help Group. 2022-07-19. Retrieved 2022-08-04.