Google Feedproxy: Should You Switch?

Back at Ratified.org, I noticed a handful of blogs whose Feedburner statistics have stopped updating. I looked into it and saw that all of their feeds have switched to a somewhat peculiar URL: http://feedproxy.google.com/xxxxxxx. Because of that, their Awareness API, the place where Ratified.org grabs all the feed statistics, are no longer working. For a while that forced me to manually update their subscriber numbers, which is a bit frustrating on my end, because I try to keep Ratified.org as fresh as possible. Doing this everyday is simply not going to be feasible.

Webmasters who decide to display Google Adsense ads inside their feeds are required to migrate their feeds to the FeedProxy thingamabob. But I found out that some have expressed regret after doing it. They say that their earnings were disappointing and their stats have gone bonkers. A few reported that they lost a chunk of their subscribers and their feed URL’s are outranking the actual posts in the search engine results!

My take on this is, I prefer to see my feed reader unencumbered by advertisements. But that’s just me and you can say it’s also because it’s giving me a hard time collecting your stats (heh). I’m not trying to dictate how you should monetize from your blogs, but my advice is that you weigh your options before doing something drastic. If you care about your Ratified.org ranking, keep your current Feedburner feed. If you don’t, go ahead and sign up for Adsense for Feeds (done via the Feedburner panel). But once that’s been done, you can’t go back to your old FB URL. A way around it is to use this plugin (for WP users only) and still keep your FB URL.

My hope is an API for Feedproxy is being developed and more stats (other than just the number of subscribers) can be pulled. At any rate, a lot of stuff is being planned (at least in my brain) for Ratified.org which I hope I can implement soon — more or less it will involve user accounts and graphs. 😛 Ahh… time. I wish I had more of you!

Thanks again to you guys who continue to use Ratified.org. I’d like to think it’s helping you track your blogs’ progress.

To bloggers in Manila and Cebu, watch out for Tita Janette Toral’s presentation about the Top 100 Blogs for 2008! There’s also a number of great interviews that you might want to check out at the Ratified.org blog.