Written on April 12, 2008 – 9:56 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our '
About' page and subscribe to our
RSS feed.
If you came here from Digg it would be great if you could actually Digg us too! Do you have a start-up that we should write about?
Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Yesterday we reported that Yahoo! is thinking about partnering with AOL and using Google’s Adsense program instead of its own to boost revenue.
It is ironic that today Google AdSense is down with a “The Google AdSense website is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later. We apologize for any inconvenience” message in 27 languages. AdSense is Google’s ad-placing program. It is the program that puts ads on website and blogs. It seems that ads are being served but the site to monitor and manage them just seems down.
Google Adwords, the ad-selling system where advertisers pay money to advertise on Google or on individual websites, is still up.
UPDATE: It is a scheduled maintenance job:
Site maintenance on April 12 at 10am PDT
Our engineers will be performing routine site maintenance tomorrow, April 12th from 10am to 2pm PDT. You won’t be able to log in to your account, but we’ll continue to serve ads to your pages and track your earnings as usual.
Located in a different time zone? Here’s the maintenance start time in a number of cities around the world:
Ottawa - 1 pm Saturday
London - 6 pm Saturday
Hyderabad - 10:30 pm Saturday
Hong Kong - 1 am Sunday
Canberra - 3 am Sunday
My suggestion to Google: put a link to that blogpost on your error page. Not every Adsense subscriber reads the Adsense blog.
Written on January 22, 2008 – 10:25 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Yesterday I read a post (can’t find it!) that explained how to get more subscribers to your RSS feeds. One tip was to show the amount of subscribers to your readers once that amount gets above 300. If you have more than 300 readers, they argued, that would show that you have a serious blog and that would make it more interesting to follow. In the previous two weeks we quickly grew to 3000+ subscribers so yesterday we included the Feedburner counter in the menubar here.
Unfortunately Feedburner is experiencing some trouble since Sunday. At first an error at FeedBlitz caused a spike in some Feedburner accounts of more than 200%. At ProBlogger the subscriber count leapt from around 39,000 to 41,000 and then to 100,000 subscribers. We haven’t seen such dramatic changes but Feedburner did stop updating all feeds altogether on Sunday.
A lot of blogs now depend on Feedburner to give some insight to the popularity of their blogs even more than visitor stats and page impressions so Feedburner not working is bad news. Unfortunately Feedburner hasn’t been giving any information about these problems. The last post on the Feedburner blog is from November 04, 2007. There is some discussion going on in the Feedburner forums about the inflated numbers though.
Feedblitz announced that their problems will most likely be fixed by Wednesday for most people and my guess is that Feedburner will start working again then too. Still, in this age of transparency it is strange that Feedburner hasn’t been communicating more. It seems that these problems started over the weekend so they have had plenty of time to report something.
UPDATE: a few minutes after I posted this story the Feedburner counter here updated for the first time in 48 hours. The Feedburner admin panel still shows old data. Seems like Feedburner is back up and updating incrementally.
UPDATE II: about an hour later the Feedburner site has been updated too. Everything seems to be back to normal. No official announcements yet.
Email
Twitter
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
