FeedBurner Alternatives for RSS and Email Subscriptions

Although there have been rumblings in the blogosphere about FeedBurner shutting down, not many details have surfaced. Until now. Sort of.

A few days ago Google announced that it will begin shuttering AdSense for Feeds — which enables bloggers to earn a bit of money by adding Google ads to their RSS feeds — on October 2nd, shutting down completely on December 3rd.

Although the demise of FeedBurner itself isn’t immediate, there’s still a lot of confusion surrounding it, and most people can read between the lines. Google has been neglecting FeedBurner since it acquired it in 2007. Not only was the product left out of Google’s “virtual refresh,” but the FeedBurner Blog was shut down not too long ago, as well as the Twitter account.

For bloggers that use FeedBurner for their RSS feed, you’ll still be able to use that URL — there’s no need to worry about redirecting. But if you’ve also got email subscribers, you might want to start researching alternative options, just in case.

Here are a few services that have been recommended to us. If you’ve used any of them and would like to weigh in, or if you have additional recommendations, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

FeedBlitz is an all-in-one solution for RSS and email subscriptions. Although it’s easy to transfer from FeedBurner, it’s a somewhat more complicated platform with a higher price tag (depending on the number of email subscribers you have; RSS subscriptions aren’t counted).

MailChimp is more targeted toward email newsletters more than RSS feeds. There is a free deal for bloggers with less than 2,000 subscribers and who send less than 12,000 emails a month.

Nourish is a free newsletter service that enables you to convert any RSS feed into an automated email newsletter. The free version lets you send up to 1,000 emails per month and includes customizable templates.

If This Then That (IFTTT) is a popular too for many bloggers, and is much more than a feed channel. For specific URLs, IFTTT can deliver updates to a variety of outputs, including email, Twitter, Facebook, Evernote, and so on.

Feedity is a similar service to FeedBurner in that setting up your feed and email is easy. It offers a free trial plan (five feeds, 24 hours update interval, 10 items per feed and ads in feeds).

You can read more about Google’s “spring cleaning” on its Official Blog.

Tagged as: email subscriptions, FeedBurner, rss