RSS Subscriber Count - Don’t Count On It
Pete of Mashable fame tackles a recurring topic: using some simple math & common sense he finds out that most of the numbers in those Feedburner chicklets which show the number of RSS subscribers for a certain blog are way off base.
The reason? Well, big RSS aggregators like Google Reader, Pageflakes, Netvibes and others have default feeds; which means that every new subscriber to those sites is automatically counted as a reader of those default feeds. So, if you have a big enough site that everyone includes it in its default RSS feed bundle, your feed subscriber count is probably larger than it realistically is. The gap between the big and the small sites widens: the big become bigger, the small grow slower and tend to stay small.
Some disclosure: this very blog is sometimes affected by this problem, with feed count showing unrealistically high (or, sometimes, low) numbers. It seems to have gotten better lately, though, but the issue is still present on many other sites.
Normally I wouldn’t see much of a problem there. I try not to take these things too seriously; after all, neither Technorati rankings nor RSS subscriber counts can ever be perfectly accurate. Techmeme doesn’t always pick up the real source of the news. Life isn’t always fair.
However, there is an important lesson to draw from this - RSS subscriber count, while perhaps a good pointer towards the quality/popularity of a certain blog, doesn’t really guarantee anything. I have some blogs in my feed reader that have tens of thousands of RSS “readers” and 5 posts in the last 3 months. I have some which have a couple hundred readers and churn out great posts every day.
Furthermore, even if the number of subscriber was close to “reality”, however we define it, people rarely unsubscribe from blogs. StartupMeme is a dead blog (hasn’t been updated since May 2007), and check its subscriber count:
The cold, harsh reality is that those cute RSS counters are fun widgets to have, but they don’t really work as a real metric, and readers should be aware of that.
October 17th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
This is a really good point, very rarely do people clean out the old/dead feeds that you either are no longer interested in or are dead blogs. But, you could also make a good point that the amount of visitors to your site don’t matter, it all has to do with the quality of readers you have, not how many you have.
October 21st, 2007 at 3:49 am
@michael: I totally agree with you on the quality fact instead of quantity. But from a marketing point of view, some just want to have more readers and do not care about the quality of readers.