For years, the only way to get a good understanding of how many people are reading and interacting with your blog feed was to run your feed though FeedBurner. Now, FeedBlitz has a service to compete.
FeedBlitz RSS claims to offer better branding, more social media integration by integrating Twitter and other social networks, a mobile optimized version of your feed, better SEO, filtering, and additional feed stats. I was hoping for some screenshots on FeedBlitz’s site, but they don’t currently offer any.
Unlike FeedBurner that is free, FeedBlitz RSS is paid. The price minimum is $1.49 per month and goes up from there based on the number unique active email subscribers in your account. This is where it gets a little confusing.
If you use FeedBlitz RSS you don’t need to use the FeedBlitz email service. In that case your cost would be $1.79 per month. If you choose to use both FeedBlitz RSS and their feed to email service, the price you pay is dependent on the number of active email subscribers you have. So if you have 45 email subscribers and 216 RSS subscribers, you will be charged at the 45 subscriber level.
Unfortunately I was unable to see what a FeedBlitz RSS feed looked like, as the examples on their site don’t render any information at the time of this post. They do offer a 30 day free trial, however you need to enter in your billing information before you can get the free trial; and I wasn’t up for that today.
Along with all the current features, FeedBlitz plans to rapidly evolve the service over the upcoming weeks and months. It’ll be interesting to see what they come out with and if people choose to move from FeedBurner.
Overall, it sounds like FeedBlitz RSS is a promising service. It’s good to have an alternative to FeedBurner as competition usually makes things better. I think they just need add some screen shots and make the free trail really free to get more people interested and trying it out.
Have you tried out FeedBlitz RSS? What do you think?
