Help Save Feedbutton

August 1st, 2007 Ryan Jones

Many of you know that one of the sites I run is called FeedButton. It’s a cool widget that lets you replace all those “add to feed reader” buttons with something else.

It’s proven very popular – it’s being used over 3000 blogs. That’s where the problem is. It’s also using about 150gig of bandwith every month, and it’s the real reason why this website is slow.

Despite everything I’ve done, I just can’t see a way to make feedbutton worth it’s weight. It’s a great service, and it offers valuable stats – but it doesn’t make any money. I’ve made $22 off of it so far this year.

I’m bleeding out money right now. I can’t afford to give it its own dedicated server if it’s making less than $2/month.

I’ve decided that I have the following options:

1. Take down the site. – I don’t want to do this. This will be a last resort
2. Make blog users host the javascript / images -This is feasible, but really hard to roll out
3. Option 2 + limit current usage – Would it piss a bunch of people off if I made their cool widget go away, and linked the button to a page that had all the feed readers listed (for readers to select one)
4. Angel Investor – I’d prefer for a company to step up and donate me a dedicated box to host the server on. I’d gladly let them brand the webpage, do a PR release about it, etc. I think this is the best option

If I can’t find somebody willing to help me save the website, I’m going to be forced to change the way it works or sell it.

If anybody’s interested, or has any ideas please drop me a line. My Gmail address is: thehockeygod

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