What is the point of feedburner?

Based on what? Google owns all kinds of stuff that doesn't do jack for your website.

The general consensus is that Feedburner's service has become LESS reliable than it was before they were bought. Google doesn't treat the product with the same priority that it does with other services.

That's just based on reading what I have from searching.

You can subscribe to a Wordpress feed with any reader as far as I know. Like I said, I don't want to even use the subscribe by email feature, because I already handle email subscriptions through the more powerful aweber. Maybe you missed where I said that.

The stats are often breaking and inconsistent - I can also get feed stats with a Wordpress plugin.

Wordpress's default feed shouldn't cause any problems for mobiles, but if it did, you could cure it with a plugin, I'm sure.

No, I didn't miss them. But you've basically verified that I don't really need it, because nothing you've mentioned here is impossible using my own domain URL for my feeds.

Re Bruce: Your mention of distributing the load on my server is the only suggestion I've heard that made sense so far, but I have to think a feed is probably a very low server load (unless you've got a lot of plugins doing dynamic stuff to those files). I think you're right that it would take a lot of traffic to get to that point.

And even then, you're distributing your load, but you're distributing it to a free service that's already not consistent, and that you have no stake or control over. I don't think that benefit is actually a real benefit when you take that into consideration.

Now, I can see the benefit of sending your feed into feedburner for the sake of having an additional feed URL to promote to aggregators, MAYBE.

But you have so many other feed options built into Wordpress like per-tag and per-category feeds that (afaik) you give up if you REPLACE your own feed URLs with the Feedburner ones.

I'd much prefer my readers to subscribe to ME if I can, not a proxy. I think I've got my answer, so thanks folks! Anyone else think differently?

Can you give me a little more detail - that statement's not as self-explanatory as I would have hoped.

I think I kind of get how that works. But part of what I do with my blogs is grab the RSS and re-publish elsewhere, which is handy for backlink building when the URLs are actually from my own domain.

However, with Feeburner, they're all proxy URLs from Google, right? It needs to be for tracking to work, but those aren't really URLs that I want re-published, because I get no link juice for my domain, plus it's going to blow my analytics anyway, wouldn't it?

Again, I could be misunderstanding, but I'm asking cause I don't know - I'd love to get more insight if this analytics integration is something you use yourself.

.Yeppp

I never got feedburner either.

Sometimes I go and check my feeds - I haven't a clue why. Or what to do with them!

Fortunately it doesn't stop me making money

Kenj

The stats are a bit unreliable, but they as far as I know it is the only way to count RSS subscribers to your blog. Also, some people are more likely to sign up for an email subscription of your post feed and less likely to sign up for a general mailing list which is more associated with getting email offers for products and other information that someone might not be interested in. Not to say that is what yours is, but it is what a lot of people assume. If they are signing up for Feedburner, they know it is just going to be your blog posts.

That being said, there is another service out on the horizon called FeedBlitz which is supposed to integrate mailing lists and email RSS subscribers. Seth Godin uses it on his blog, for example.

I personally use Feedburner. It's simple, it's integrated with my Google account, and I can see who signs up for email subscriptions of my posts, unlike if someone just signs up under a feed reader.