Hindi Song | FeedBlitz Custom Domains for your RSS to Email Newsletters

The email newsletter for this blog is delivered via FeedBlitz and I have lot of good things to say about the company. The service is completely free and they have always delivered the email messages on time.

This week FeedBlitz introduced Custom Domains that allow publishers to add some their own branding to landing pages.

Let me explain - if someone considers subscribing to the email newsletter of this blog, he is taken to a page like feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz for confirming the mode of subscription (whether he wants to receive updates via email, twitter, Skype, etc).

With Custom Domain, you can secure a sub-domain on FeedBlitz servers so your landing page has a more simple address and your brand is included in the URL. For instance, I could choose a domain like labnol.feedblitz.com or digitalinspiration.feedblitz.com instead of that cryptic feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?Sub=753.

Alternatively, if you have control over your DNS records, you can set up a CNAME entry like newsletters.labnol.org and point it to FeedBlitz. You need to pay around $10 a year for a FeedBlitz custom domain.

Sound pretty reasonable to me but this morning some really respectable sites have blasted this new FeedBlitz service as "ill-conceived" and for using "extortion as a business model." I can’t see a reason why these "custom domains" would invoke such a strong reaction or maybe I am missing something. Phil Hollows?