It seems like Leo Laporte is pretty angry about the fact that Feedburner let it be known how many subscribers the TWIT podcast was getting… well, kind of.
Yesterday Information Week published an article about podcasting quoting Feedburner’s VP Business Development, Rick Klau. Klau quoted a figure of 41,000 for our subscribers. This is in direct violation of Feedburners stated privacy policy, and I consider it a real breach of trust. This information is proprietary and they don’t have my permission to disclose it to any third party. It also damages us materially since he severely understated our subscriber base. We have 100,000 downloads per show from AOL alone.
Even though Feedburner didn’t get the numbers right, I can’t say that I am at all happy about what Feedburner has done here. Breaking your privacy policy isn’t the way to win many folks over. Then again, I depend on Feedburner a lot for the Web Hosting Show’s RSS feed. The reason I do is because I host the audio files for the Web Hosting Show on a different server than the content for the Web Hosting Show.
So what is a podcaster to do? I’m going to wait this out for now to see what happens next. I have a feeling it might not get any prettier, but I would like to hear some answers from Feedburner’s side.
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