People tend to flock to those that they think everyone else is following so high RSS numbers are good for that. And of course there are egos to be stroked! But for my business, which is an art gallery, I would rather have a group of highly engaged readers even if the number is smaller. Doug, Copyblogger does a little over 13, feed views a day over the last 30 days.
Summer is slower than other parts of the year, but that should give you an idea. High subscriber numbers are self-reinforcing, in that they lead to other quality subscribers.
Buck, I think subscriber levels do influence advertisers as John Jantsch just said in his comment. Pearson and Brogan, yes… the stat I check first in the morning is the money. But as I stated in the post and in this comment social proof is self-reinforcing… and it leads to higher overall subscriber engagement levels, even if the ratios are out of whack.
A group of us just had this discussion the other day, and I would far and away choose fewer subscribers that are there on purpose, engaged, and commenting. And did a little research. Throughout the week, I had between 11 and 15 people access my blog each day via my Feedburner feed. I had comments during the same 7-day period, so Another blog I read daily said she had over 7, page views last week.
She had 91 comments, so 1. Most of us have been there at one point or another. But the headline and much of your article dances around though never states some idea that RSS numbers say, as reported by FeedBurner are inaccurate. Not really. Is it a hugely overinflated number when compared with his truly engaged audience? Of course. Maybe you should go to his blog to disagree with his conclusions. I take a lot of time to provide hands-on usable information and so I would really want to get subscribers that hunger for the next post and will come to read it because it helps them.
Of course being able to floss a high sub count surely would attract more subs but I would hope that my content would keep them coming back.
Thanks, JR. I prefer community over plain numbers, however like many have said here, those numbers can help build your community. Bogus subscriber counts completely contradict the purpose of the web — to share information, connect and build relationships. Great post….
Great point. I have had one heck of a time getting my first 50 subscribers but I also know most of them came from places like blog catalog and are misleading but I still dont think I am waisting my time as long as I am involved in different things in addition to gaining subscribers.
I am very confused by the different kinds of stat counters and the different ways of calculating visitors. Does anyone know of a website without an ax to grind that explains all this so clearly and simply that even a copywriter can understand it? Feedburner only looks at feeds that go through them, not the feeds one creates on their own.
I have no idea how to track those. According to Feedburner, I have no one subscribed to my feed, but I know for a fact that there are some people who subscribe. I once went to the book store and opened up a book only to find someone had left their business card in it. Was it deception? I doubt it. Call me crazy. But I also understand your need to legitimize those numbers even as some commenters paint them as somewhat bogus.
My guess is that high subscriber numbers help you demand greater sponsorship dollars for your blog and other products. A note on Feedburner: I have two other analytics packages installed on my blog and I suspect that in many cases, Feedburner under reports subscriber numbers.
The page views reported by Feedburner are dwarfed by the analytics reports. It gives me little confidence in my Feedburner subscriber numbers. Thanks for that! But that RSS feed bundle makes a great deal of sense. Even so, props on getting that popular to be included in those bundles.
I wrote about the Feedburner myth way, way back in…well, not that way back, February I think feed counts are temperamental and as mentioned here, if your feed is bundled with a reader then you can steal a march on other sites without even trying.
I may not comment on everything… but I do read most of the new things that come in. So thank you. That would be very useful. I also enjoy some regular commenters but of course, they are those who obviously just promoting their blogs. But I value them more because I know most of them are really enjoying what they are reading from my posts and I also get the chance to check their blogs and learn from them too.
Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 3 months ago. Active 6 years, 8 months ago. Viewed 4k times. Improve this question. VirtuosiMedia VirtuosiMedia IMHO quite drastic but operable! Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Here's how Google does it source : Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers, aggregators, and bots on the market to make additional inferences.
Improve this answer. Thanks for the suggestion. There are problems with this method, though. That would be ideal, but unfortunately authentication is not the way most feeds have worked in the wild. I'm not even sure if most RSS readers support something like that.
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Email Required, but never shown. The Overflow Blog. Does ES6 make JavaScript frameworks obsolete? Podcast Do polyglots have an edge when it comes to mastering programming Featured on Meta. It gives a name, a URL for more information, and the number of subscribers. How to count these various types?
It depends. The user-agent does not know how many people read the web page and does not provide the URL of the page where the feed will appear. When all of these things are processed and added together, I discovered that there might have been subscribers on April 30, Readers could be lower people who subscribe in more than one place but read in one; readers who simply have not bothered to delete the subscription in a no-longer-favored aggregator or higher people who read the feed through web pages or through syndicators that use aggregators as the source of their information and then redistribute it elsewhere — via tools such as ZapTXT and Feed2JS.
But this number will have to do for now. This would be really useful if the source was available. My logs are way too big to upload via a web form, and I use the combined format. Any idea where I could find some tools for this?
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