One of the services from feed distributor FeedBurner will be available for free, thanks to their new owners, Google.
Google’s recent acquisition of FeedBurner has stirred up a lot of press for the search giant.
FeedBurner has announced that both its Stats PRO and MyBrand services will be free from now on. Prior to the acquisition, Feedburner customers had to pay for premium reporting services.
FeedBurner is a news-feed management provider, which offers custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers.
One of the many benefits that FeedBurner publishers will enjoy now that FeedBurner is part of the Google family is a little something we like to call, “more for free!”
FeedBurner Stats PRO is an enhanced reporting option that gives users a more detailed look at subscriber numbers, item click-through tracking, CTR optimization, uncommon uses, podcast downloads, feed reach, aggregate item uses, on-site statistics, and more.
PRO is feed analytics taken to the next level. Users can now have access to the number of people who have viewed or clicked individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content.
You can turn this on by signing in to your account, navigating to the Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the “Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features.
Previous “PRO” customers will not be charged for the month of June 2007 and beyond. Also, after newly activating either of these features or services, you’ll notice a nifty new “PRO” badge next to your feed(s) on My Feeds page.
MyBrand
Formerly a for-pay service, MyBrand is now available for no charge.
The MyBrand service (also PRO-level) is located under the “My Account” tab after you have signed in.
The MyBrand service offered by FeedBurner allows site publishers to serve feeds and maintain their domain brand, instead of having the more generic FeedBurner domain appear.
For example, rather than using feeds.feedburner.com/MyFeedName, your MyBrand-ed feed address can be feeds.myexcellentdomain.net/MyFeedName.
MyBrand is a service that really appeals to larger sites that still want the benefits of using FeedBurner, such as stat tracking, but want everything to be hosted on their own domain. MyBrand lets you host your feed and access all of your stats from your domain to make the whole experience very transparent.
Ionut Alex Chitu at Google Operating System welcomed the change in terms. He noted the service used to cost $3-$14 per month, based on the number of feeds coming from an account.
To get started with MyBrand, sign into FeedBurner, click the “My Account” link in the upper left-hand corner, and then click “MyBrand”.
Nota Bene: You must be comfortable playing around with DNS entries and own the rights to the domain whose DNS entries you will be playing around with in order to successfully activate MyBrand.
Site publishers who value their brands, and that should include anyone with a modicum of marketing savvy, will want to activate MyBrand for their accounts. FeedBurner has earned a place as a valuable service for websites that publish feeds, and MyBrand makes those feeds more valuable now.
So, if you are interested in either of these services, just log in to your FeedBurner account and make the upgrade for free. Hopefully these are just the first of many improvements to come for FeedBurner now that it is backed by Google.