Plus, some perspectives on which is better to follow a blog or a website - Newsletters, Social Media, or RSS Feeds?
Discontinuation of Blogger Email Subscriptions - What this means to Bloggers and what are the alternatives? Plus, some perspectives on which is better to follow a blog or a website - Email Newsletters, Social Media, RSS Feeds, or something else?
A sample preview of our travel blog's newsletter which was powered by Feedburner. An example for how a typical email from Feedburner's email subscriptions service looked like.
And that also means that you may temporarily not receive any updates by email for new posts on this blog, in case I do not set-up a suitable alternative by July. If you're an active susbcriber, no need to worry, as you'll be notified.
Now, although this began as a short post in the beginning, it quickly grew longer. So, let me warn you that this is a long read. Here's a handy jump link menu with sub-section headings for you.
Jump to:
Feedburner powered Blogger Email Subscription is going away
If you're a Blogger, then you'd have already seen this following announcement notification on your blog's dashboard.
Notice seen on Blogger
FollowByEmail widget (Feedburner) is going away
You are receiving this information because your blog uses the FollowByEmail widget (Feedburner).
Recently, the Feedburner team released a system update announcement, that the email subscription service will be discontinued in July 2021.
After July 2021, your feed will still continue to work, but the automated emails to your subscribers will no longer be supported. If you’d like to continue sending emails, you can download your subscriber contacts.
Another notification below it says :
Join the Google Web Creators community! Complementing the community forums, you’ll now get Blogger news, general blogging tips & inspiration, product updates from Google via Google Web Creators. Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or our blog to become part of our freshly minted community.
This means that if you intend to continue offering a Subscribe to Blog updates by Email service, or an email newsletter which automatically sent either new posts of your blog by email or notified about new posts in your blog to your email subscribers, then you'll have to look for alternatives.
What's the alternatives?
So far, email newsletters from Blogger went out automatically to whoever subscribed to it, thanks to Feedburner. But this won't be the case from July 2021 onward.
A website called Feedburner Alternatives lists alternatives and gives a comparison between them. I did some searching for alternatives online and I discuss below about some alternatives that I came across.
Important: One tricky part about an alternative is whether the new service you're going to choose for your subscribe by email or newsletters feature, one thing you need to look for is how the new service that you migrate to is going to handle your existing subscribers when you import them. For example, some services, in order to comply to GDPR or privacy laws or such concerns (which is a good thing), may require your existing subscribers to explicitly opt-in or consent again to receive your newsletters from their platform. In such a case, you may lose a few followers due to various reasons such as your existing subscribers not seeing this new consent email (especially if it ends up in a "Promotions" tab or in spam folders instead of the Primary Inbox of your email service) or due to some of them not choosing to consent again.
So, what are the alternatives? Feedburner powered email subscription was a very useful and free service to Bloggers. While there are reputed newsletter services like Mail Chimp, they have their limitations, and if you have more than 2000 subscribers, you'll have to opt for their paid subscription plan which is more than Rs. 1000 per month.
I don't think an average Blogger would want to spend so much for a RSS-to-Email service, for most of us on Blogger do not earn anything, let alone so much, to afford for pricey services like that. Also, there's no point in a paid service unless you're earning more than what you'll be paying, or if you have extra money which you want to spend on it.
A service called follow.it (that's listed in the aforementioned Feedburner Alternatives website) offers unlimited subscribers and emails along with RSS-to-Email Newsletter feature. Other services like FeedBlitz (which originally powered Feedburner's email delivery service) charges a minimum of about $7 USD per month (for 0 to 100 subscribers) for this service.
I came across follow.it while searching online for solutions, I found this one on a Blogger blog called MAKING A MARK, who were also looking for alternatives. This follow.it service (formerly SpecificFeeds.com) is a part of the Inisev product family which offers different SaaS tools and products.
This looks like a newer or lesser known service as I don't recall seeing this one anywhere before. There's not much information about the parent company or its owners, on the Inisev website, except for links to some of their projects like some WordPress plugins and other services. Formerly known as SpecificFeeds.com, they relaunched this service as follow.it sometime last year in 2020, as seen on their Twitter feed.
In the below subsections, I discuss briefly about some other alternatives with some details about them.
Newsletter-plus-Blogging services
There are free Newsletter-plus-Blogging services such as Substack and Revue, on which one can blog while providing premium paid content too. While they're free for free newsletters, these platforms earn a percentage of the fee if you go for paid newsletters and charge your readers for your paid or premium content.
Substack charges 10% and Revue charges 5%, plus the additional processing fee charges by the payments processors, on both platforms. While they're great for simple blogging plus newsletters, there are limitations on these platforms if you're considering blogging aspects, and they've got very limited customisation features, like for example, the have no option to edit the HTML or CSS if you wanted to.
Now, coming to the main point, that is a Feedburner Alternative, so far, there is no way you can set up a automated RSS Feed to Newsletter service like that of Feedburner's, for free without limitations, or even for a very low cost for that matter.
While on Revue, there's a simple drag-and-drop option to add Tweets and RSS Feeds easily to your newsletter posts, there is no way that new posts on your blog are automatically sent through email to your subscribers, like what Feedburner did.
On Substack, even though you can subscribe to any RSS feeds in its reader, there is currently no way to add a post on your feed into your newsletter posts. As of now, on Substack, you will have to manually add text, links, and pictures.
Both these platforms may come up with newer features in the future, and maybe some of the new features could be exclusive to those who run a premium or paid newsletters too.
Earlier this year, Twitter acquired Revue and it has made Revue’s Pro features free for all accounts and lowered the paid newsletter fee to 5%. So, if you're okay with manually scheduling or sending your email newsletters, you may try that. You can add your Twitter account or your blog's RSS Feed to it and then easily drag and drop new posts into newsletter. Plus, it also automatically pulls the heading, search description, and thumbnail from any link inserted into the post editor. In Substack, such features are still absent.
If you want to wait for Facebook's upcoming newsletter service, I'm not sure if it will be released by July or not, and it specifically says "in the U.S", so it looks like this platform may not be available to the rest of the world.
As Feedburner's email subscription service is going to stop from July, that's only about a month from now, you don't have much time in case you want to keep continued email subscription service for your Blogger blog. Let's have a look at some of the Email Newsletter and Marketing services below.
Email Newsletter and Marketing Services
The benefit of these services is that you can use them for email marketing as well as sending email newsletters. However, you may not need all those services unless you have to market some products or books or anything else to your subscribers. Will they work out as an alternative to the automated Email updates that Feedburner was providing so far? Let's briefly look at it with some examples below.
Below image shows screenshot of a list of top ten Email Newsletter and Marketing Services listed on Zapier. There's a total of 80 services listed in there, including Revue. While this may not be a complete list of all such Email Newsletter service providers, it's a good place to start looking if you're interested.
You can check the pricing pages of some popular email newsletter services and their free tier limits and their premium packages. Most of these services are also email marketing services with other customer relation tools and all. If you're looking for only RSS-to-Email Newsletter service, you will have to dig into their pricing details pages to check if that's included in their overall package for a package tier.
These services can charge typically from $9 to $15 in their lowest paid tiers. Their plans or tiers will have different maximum limits on each plan or tier. Their free tiers will have more limitations, typically, like a maximum cap on the number of subscribers or the number of emails sent, or both.
For example, I'll briefly discuss the top email newsletter and marketing services which are listed on Zapier. If you have the time and patience, you can yourself check out all the 80 services listed there and what they offer in different tiers or plans, and see if anything suits your needs.
I'll just look into what the free tier for some of those services offer, as for now, as I'm not ready to invest in paid ones yet as they appear too expensive for my requirements. After all, I just need a service to notify my new blog posts as email, something like what Feedburner used to do.
Coming back to the free tiers of Email Newsletter and Marketing services, in the ones that I looked into, it appears like MailChimp's free tier comes with an automation possibility which can be used to automate RSS-to-Email Newsletters.
However, this isn't clearly mentioned in their current pricing page, but if you look for more details of their free tier by clicking on their About Free link there, it says that "1-step automations" are available for the free tier. And when you click on 1-step automations link and then go to their automations page and scroll down somewhat, it lists RSS to Email as one of their automation features. What's not clear to me is that whether it comes under what they call "1-step automations" or not.
MailChimp free tier has a maximum subscriber limit of 2,000 contacts (that is, that would be a maximum of 2,000 subscribers to your email newsletter), and also, there's a limit of a maximum 2,000 emails per month. That is, if you have 2,000 subscribers and you automated an RSS to Email (if it is possible in the free tier, that is), then you can send only one newsletter to each of your subscriber every month. If you have lesser number of subscribers, maybe you can try it. For example, if you have 1,000 subscribers, you can send two emails per month to all of them.
In case of MailerLite, their free tier has a maximum of 1,000 subscribers and a maximum of 12,000 emails per month. And as listed on their pricing page, Email automations and RSS to Email Campaigns are available in their free plan. That is, if you had 1,000 subscribers, then you could send 12 emails to them per month. Not bad, if your number of subscribers are below 1,000.
In the other ones that I looked into, most of them appear to have a limit to either maximum number of subscribers or number of emails per month, or both. Sendinbue has no limits on the number of contacts or subscribers you can have on a free tier, and their free tier also comes with an option to automate RSS to Email Newsletters (listed under API & plugins), as seen on their pricing page. However, there's a limit on total number of emails per day, and if an automated RSS-to-Newsletter email to each contact is counted separately, then you may be able to send to only the first 300 contacts on your subscribers list, or maybe it won't get sent at all. Their Marketing automation workflows is upto 2,000 contacts for the free tier.
Aweber's free tier allows a maximum of 500 subscribers and a maximum of 3,000 emails per month. It does have Email automation and RSS to email features included in its free tier.
Mailjet's free tier comes with a limit of 6,000 emails per month and 200 emails per day. There is no limit to the number of subscribers, that is you can have unlimited subscribers in the free tier too. Marketing Automation is not included in their free tier, but only in premium and above plans. I couldn't find any mention of RSS to email on their pricing page.
SendFox's free plan comes with a maximum of 1,000 contacts (subscribers) and an unlimited but throttled email sends per month. As per their help article, Customers on the free plan have emails sent at a slower rate depending on availability of their system resources which is typically around one deliverable email sent per minute. Automation emails count towards the send per month limit. They offer a Lifetime Plan of a one-time payment of $49 USD, which comes with up to 5,000 subscribers (and if you want to have more than 5k subscribers, it will cost +$49 per extra 5k subscribers).
Constant Contact, Flodesk, Campaign Monitor do not have a free tier. On Campaign Monitor, it’s free to create an account and send a campaign to only five subscribers. Only when you choose a paid plan, you get to send to more than five. Of these, Campaign Monitor appears to have a lower priced basic tier of only $9 USD/month.
Anyway, you are free to check out all these services listed above or any others too which you may find yourself, and see if anything works for you. I haven't covered all the 80 services listed on Zapier as I haven't gone through all of them yet and I haven't looked much into services not listed there.
Or something else altogether?
In case you're using self-hosted WordPress or Ghost for your blogging, self hosted or otherwise, they include Email Subscription or Email Newsletter features. For WordPress, you'll find it in Jetpack, Even the free blog on WordPress.com has a follow by email feature included.
Important: I've seen some article on some other site which suggests you to delete your Feedburner feed when you switch to an alterative. I suggest that don't do it!
If you're worrying about subscribers or followers receiving duplicate emails from both services after you've switched to an altervative, then simply turn off the Email Subscriptions feature in Feedburner. Remember that Feedburner is still alive and it will still be very useful to you to serve your site feeds or RSS feeds, among other uses.
To disable Feedburner's Email Newsletter feature, all you need to do is to go to the Publicize tab in your site or blog's Feedburner account, and then go to the Email Newsletter option there and click on the little Deactivate button there.
Why, Google? Why?
What baffles me is why did Google, who owns Feedburner, decide to shut down the email subscription service. Although a lot of people have been predicting the ultimate doomsday of Feedburner, that's not the case here because Google is keeping Feedburner itself alive.
This also strips away a very useful service off the Blogger platform too (and I'd even say it's one of the basic services that a blogging platform should have), and as per their Help page, they are unable to provide or suggest any alternatives.
Photo by Rajeshwar Bachu on Unsplash
While on one hand, Google says that they're "creating an entire outreach ↦ support initiative just for you, the web creators that create amazing content every day" through their "Google Web Creators" blog and community, and on the other hand, they remove a very useful feature on their own blogging platform Blogger, without providing any alternative. Also, "Currently, there are no plans to support this feature again in the future", says their Blogger Help Page. It appears contradictory to me.
Okay, so they decided to shut down a very useful feature; But why? Did most Bloggers not use it or want it? Was is costing more to keep running the free Feedburner powered email subscription feature and it just wasn't worth their time and resources? As per news reports, their profits have only increased despite the pandemic situation across the world. But despite that, it isn't odd for a company to cut off services that they don't perceive as valuable (to them).
Even though everyone has been expecting the ultimate doom of Feedburner itself since years, this move of discontinuing a useful service appears very odd to me, especially when it affects everyone using Blogger as a blogging platform. I'd say it's a bad move which discourages people using Blogger.
At least they could've offered a paid or premium newsletter service for those wanting to charge for it while keeping it free for others, in my opinion. I mean, there's lots of customisation features on Blogger blogs already. Wouldn't that be a plus point for Blogger in comparison to other services and make it a more powerful and attractive platform to blog on? Especially when Twitter has already got into the email newsletter business by acquiring Revue and Facebook is planning to. Did the Google Plus debacle make them feel that it wasn't worth jumping on the bandwagon too, even though they already own a good blogging platform like Blogger? I don't know, and I'm just speculating.
But whatever the actual reasons behind this bewildering move, I have no idea what goes behind the scenes and what exactly made them discontinue this feature, so I really should not comment much about their decision. It was their decision to make and they did. So, I can speak here considering my perspective only, and in my perspective, it is very disappointing to see this feature going away from Blogger. Also, cutting down features is not a good sign for any platform, but I would want to believe that this had to something do especially with Feedburner itself, rather than Blogger, even though this affects everyone on Blogger. I do wish they had preserved the feature for Blogger users only, at least.
About Blogger, I don't like their apparent indifference to bug reports and the difficulty in finding good documentation for development. For example, I report a simple template bug or two and nothing happens for months and years. And they even lock your question in the Community Forum so that nobody gets a chance to respond to it in the future too. Amazing isn't it? We Bloggers have to scratch our heads and waste a lot of time searching on the internet for solutions and hacks for silly Blogger bugs and issues.
Sadly, it appears like lots of feedback, bug reports, and feature requests on Blogger appear to receive either no action or there's only utter silence in return. I wonder sometimes - does anyone even read them?
Don't get me wrong, for I really like Blogger as a blogging platform and I'd love if they added some useful features instead of removing some. A good thing is that they recently updated the Blogger platform and made it a little better to use. Someone with a little knowledge of HTML and CSS can easily optimise their Blogger blog too, unlike many other blogging platforms. I have learnt a lot of HTML and CSS thanks to Blogger.
So, what do we Bloggers do now?
Active Bloggers should be looking for alternatives already. There's only a month left until the email subscriptions feature is discontinued. In any case, Bloggers who don't earn much or any revenue at all from their blogs wouldn't want to go for paid options for an email newsletters service as they appear too expensive for the cause, unless you don't mind going for a free tier of one of those services and keep running it for a minimum number of subscribers.
Saying goodbye to the Feedburner powered Blogger Email Subscriptions. Featuring the screenshots of the typical Feedburner subscription boxes on this blog.
If we don't find a suitable alternative, I guess we'd have to put up a prominent notice on our blogs saying "Please Bookmark This Blog in your web browser" or "Add our site to your favourites" or something like that.
I'd like to stick around Blogger as it is, as of now, as there aren't much email subscribers for me anyway (please don't ask how many and embarrass me), and I don't blog that frequently anyway.
I hate to see that old email subscription box below go away, but if that's how it's going to be, then so be it. In case I choose and migrate to an alternative for the email subscription or newsletter service, I'll let you know.
What now, Social Media or RSS Feeds?
By the way, it was really easy to subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds in a feed reader. Yet, it is claimed that it didn't gain much popularity because people didn't understand what to do with it. But I don't think so. Some say that the rise of social media sites put an end to it. But I don't agree with that one either.
The drawbacks of social media for following
I'd say that a large part of social media crowd is a totally different crowd - one who's only into showing-off their pics and stuff and all those sorts of activities. There's also another sort of people who depend upon social media for updates from the websites they like to follow and other news and updates. But social media, thanks to their obnoxious algorithms which decide what to show you and what not to in their home feeds, are a very bad place for the latter sort of people.
This is because the home feeds on all popular social media websites are run by algorithms which can effectively shove some posts below others or hide them from the readers or followers, and sometimes only three or four out of a hundred followers actually get to see the post. That is, you may never even see or know when most pages you followed had posted something new on Facebook, unless you've already been interacting a lot with that particular page, or whatever other "engagement factors" their almighty algorithms deem worthy of your attention.
It's a similar case on any other algorithm-run feeds of social media. Not to mention too many spammers and content thieves who'd have more followers than your humble original-content-only pages. Also, another factor is that if your follower follows lots of other people, handles, or pages, there's a chance that your post may never get seen by your followers for it gets lost among several others in their home feed.
There is very poor segmentation in social media home feeds right now and all posts are "magically" sorted by some know-all almighty algorithms and shown to you in a never-ending obnoxious infinite scrolling manner. What's worse is that if you refresh the page, some posts which were there just before you refreshed, will disappear and never to be seen again in there.
Whatever the case, if you're a page or a publisher and unless you're paying for an advertisement spot, most of your posts shared on social media sites may never even be seen by your followers, let alone be discovered by others, in case you're not already a popular person/brand/publication etc., with a humongous following. And the rampant hashtag spamming on social media makes it even worse.
RSS Feeds are better for following, but they're still an unpopular choice
Social media clearly doesn't help the average bloggers, and ever since social media gained popularity, blogging, or reading blogs itself has gone down drastically. Site feeds like RSS and Atom, on the other hand, would be really useful if they were easily subscribable somewhere by your readers, with a simplicity of a button click.
But so far it has never been that simple, as when you click on an RSS feed button on any website, it either takes you to a page full of XML code or a Feedburner or FeedBlitz or any other feed burning hosted pages which show human readable content, but an average internet user would still be confused on why he or she should be bothered to view this page instead viewing the website directly. An average visitor to your blog would also be reluctant to create a new account on a feed reading service just to subscribe to updates from your blog.
The feed subscribing services listed on Feedburner page, for example, may not resonate with your typical readers as they wouldn't be wanting to register to a new unknown service just to follow your blog that way.
Had the social media giants wanted, they could've included this following by site feeds feature, but perhaps it's more beneficial for them to push their algorithm-chosen content towards you rather than provide a useful service. Besides, how many social media users these days are actually interested in finding and subscribing to updates from sites or blogs in the first place?
Unfortunately, popular feed readers like Google Reader shut down years ago citing declining usage, and even Firefox web browser, which had an inbuilt support to subscribe to site feeds, called "Live Bookmarks", ended this feature some years ago.
Although there are freemium alternatives like Feedly and others, the advantage with Google and Firefox was that you didn't need to depend upon or make an account on another third party application or service for this purpose.
But then, things may soon change, hopefully
This was the scene with RSS Feeds or any other site feeds so far. But now, things may hopefully change without us Bloggers or our readers requiring to do anything much on their side. You ask how? See below!
RSS Feeds to bounce back to prominence?
However, as I write this, I just found out that Google Chrome browser may soon get its very own RSS feed reader. As per a recent blog post on the Chromium blog, posted on May 19th of 2021, they're experimenting with a new feature, which would be a follow button in Google Chrome browser, to help people get the latest content from sites they want to follow.
The upcoming follow button feature in Chrome browser. Screenshot from blog post on the Chromium blog
Hmm... So is this why Google went ahead with discontinuing Feedburner's Email Subscription service for they knew it is more beneficial for people to subscribe to blogs and sites right inside their web browsers without the need to hand over their email address and get their email inbox all cluttered with newsletters? Or is this just a coincidence?
Personally, I'd prefer to subscribe or follow a site or a blog via RSS or site feeds rather than email newsletters. And I believe more people may follow new blogs and websites through Chrome's upcoming RSS follow, than they'd ever have done via email.
This could actually benefit lesser known blogs and websites that have good content (like *ahem* this very blog, for example) as typically there'd be a very very few people who'd want to subscribe through email to every new blog they came across on the internet.
It's easier to follow or unfollow a blog or website by just clicking or tapping on a little button in the browser's menu. And unlike email newsletters, there's no extra work of deleting all those received emails if you don't like it.
I am really looking forward for this new feature on Google Chrome and I hope other web browsers will follow suit as well. And, well, looks like we'll be soon back to promoting our RSS Feeds again, eh?
But then again, looking at this upcoming Chrome feature, you do not need to do anything much at all. You don't even need to bother about placing an RSS Follow button on your blog or website, as the browser would have it inbuilt. And as all contemporary blogs and website platforms will typically have RSS or site feeds already inbuilt and enabled by default, you wouldn't have to bother about that too.
Although you may need to tell your visitors about this new feature when it appears on a newer version of Chrome and hope that everyone keeps their browsers updated to the latest version.
Consuming RSS Feeds is such fun now!
A modified version of the original photo by Magali Guimarães from Pexels.
Here's the catch : Your blog's readers or visitors wouldn't even need to know what is a site feed or an RSS feed, and they wouldn't even need to click on any RSS feed button or link on your blog.
That is, from your reader's perspective, they wouldn't even need to know or bother about what the heck is RSS feeds. They wouldn't even need to look at some XML code and scratch their head or look for an RSS or Feed reader to subscribe to your feed, as was the case so far. When Chrome's new feature rolls out, they'll have little a follow button shown for a website (which has RSS feeds enabled), and all they need to do to follow your site is to click that little follow button. It's that simple.
Now isn't that great? I'll answer this for you. Yes it is! This is what RSS feeds was really supposed to do in the first place -- a really simple way of syndication and subscription. What has to be seen is how well this upcoming Chrome feature gets implemented and announced or promoted.
Interestingly, as aforementioned, Mozilla Firefox had discontinued its inbuilt RSS or site feed reader back in 2018. It was useful, when it lasted. I wonder whether this recent Chrome development may inspire them to reintroduce this feature? We'll have to wait and see.
Coming back to Blogger, it is a great blogging platform, and with some more features and with lesser bugs, it has a great edge to compete with a lot others in the blogging space. But only if Google wishes to.
Let me know your thoughts on all this if you're a Blogger too, and any solutions that you may have found for the soon-to-be-discontinued email subscription service. Are you looking for alternatives too or it doesn't really matter to you anyway?
Disclaimer
Please note that the pricing and tiers of different services mentioned in above article are as they were at the time this article was being written. Any future changes to them may not be reflected in the above post. Also, the mentions or reviews above are not endorsements and they're neither advice nor discouragements. I have only discussed from my perspective about some services that I came across while looking for alternatives. You should examine on your own about the reliability of any services before you choose to rely on them.
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