If you don’t log into Feedburner on a regular basis – and perhaps even if you do – you might not be aware that Google’s purchase of Feedburner has some impact on you.
As of Saturday February 28th, if you haven’t transferred your feed to the new Google account, you won’t be able to check your stats or manage your settings for your RSS feeds until you do transfer your account.
I don’t know why, but this change has not been well publicized. In fact, I only learned about it from Twitter. Someone I follow Tweeted about it, which caused me to dig a bit. I certainly never received a message from Feedburner/Google.
According to Google, you won’t lose your feed; subscribers will still receive your posts even if you don’t migrate your account before February 28th. You just won’t have access to your account.
Changing is easy. I logged into my Feedburner account today and there was a link that let me automatically transfer my account to my Google account. This is the same user and password you use for gmail, Google Alerts etc.
If you have subscribe button for your RSS and a feed counter on your blog, you’ll need to get new code once you’ve made the transfer. I have my subscribe links in a WordPress widget. I just copied the code for Google Feedburner and pasted it over the old code.
According to Google, your stats may take up to 72 hours to transfer. So if you transfer your account, don’t freak out if your stats suddenly go way down. They should be correct within a few days.
What does this mean for you?
Google’s Adsense for Feeds blog writes: “our highest priority is making sure your feed is served as fast as possible after you update your content, and is as close as technically possible to being available 100% of the time.”
But the real change is you can now have Adsense in your RSS feeds. For people using Adsense, I guess this is an important change because you won’t lose revenue because people are reading your posts from within a reader rather than going to your site.
Andrea J. Stenberg
