FeedBurner is a popular RSS feed manager, with over 600.000 feeds in their roster. One of the advantages it offers is tracking the statistics for your RSS feed usage. Publishers can also choose to go public with this data, and many of them are displaying the number of their RSS subscribers, according to FeedBurner, on their site. (for example, on this site, it’s the little chicklet in the right side of the header; click it, and you will get an option to subscribe to the RSS feed for FranticIndustries in the feed reader of your choice)
However, FeedBurner, for some reason, isn’t trying to be a popularity measuring tool. They have the data. They have the capabilities. Yet, they’re not maintaining any sort of top list of feeds with the most subscribers. The number of RSS subscribers is not the ultimate way to measure the popularity of a website, but it’s a really important metric. If FeedBurner were to maintain such a top list, it would be at least as important as Technorati and Alexa’s top lists.
Besides waiting for FeedBurner to actually do a top list, the second best thing I could do is to create my own list of top blogs according to their FeedBurner RSS subscriber data. Maybe this experiment encourages the folks at FeedBurner to do the same thing themselves.
Bear in mind that this list is obtained in completely unscientific ways, as I simply checked out the number of RSS subscribers for blogs I know to be very popular (over 500 of them) and who have their RSS subscriber number public, and created the list from those numbers. I might have (and probably did) miss some - if you have a correction, please let me know so I can add it to the list. In any case, this list is not meant to be a definitive metric of any kind. It’s just here to tickle curiosity.
*I’ve focused on English blogs only, anything else would be far to complicated for me to do
**the numbers below are live, which means they can change over time, and the rankings might become wrong. However, it will be fun to see who went up and who went down from this point
***I chose to go with 40 sites because roughly after that number there’s a huge number of sites with similar numbers of RSS subscribers, so it gets much harder sorting them all out
****Update: I’ve updated the list with some of the suggestions from the comments, so it’s now a bit bigger than Top40, but also a bit more accurate.
So, here it is, the top 40 sites according to the number of their RSS subscriptions, as measured by FeedBurner:
4. Interesting Thing of the Day
13. How to Change the World by Guy Kawasaki
22. Jeff Clavier’s Software Only
25. My Personal Finance Journey
————-
As you can see, this site - while not doing bad - is still far from the top 50. I’m putting it here in the hope that some day, it’ll be in this highly respected company. If you’d like to help me get there, now is the time to subscribe to my RSS feed.
————-
What have we learned from this? For me, the journey was as important as the destination. While this is certainly not a fully accurate top list, while composing the list I was able to notice some interesting trends. Here they are in no particular order.
- RSS is not yet as mainstream as we - the tech crowd - would like it to be. Sites related to IT & technology have a much higher RSS subscriber count than others. I saw some sites about sports, parenting and other topics which had millions of daily visits, but only a couple of thousands of RSS subscribers. This was one of the reasons why I was able to do the above top list - I primarily had to search among the IT & tech sites.
- mainstream media publications - like NYTimes, Reuters, AFP - as well as big companies, like Microsoft and Google, rarely use FeedBurner. They probably want to have full control over their RSS feed themselves.
- to be in the top 50 (and probably the top 100) sites by RSS subscriber count, you need to have over 10.000 RSS subscribers. With the rising popularity of personal homepages, like Google IG and Netvibes, which deliver their content primarily via RSS, this number will probably rise quickly in the future.
- a big percentage of major blogs don’t disclose their RSS subscriber count information. I guess it’s the same as hiding traffic - if no one knows the real numbers except you, you always have the upper hand.
Conclusion
All in all, although exhausting, this experiment has proved to be very interesting. I think that it proves that FeedBurner could benefit from maintaining a top list of their biggest publishers, and I think that this info would be very interesting to advertisers and readers alike. However, my research has also shown that tech related sites have many more RSS subscribers than other sites, so this also is something to consider. It will also be quite interesting to visit this list in the future to see how the numbers have changed, so the top list itself - while certainly not a definitive metric - might prove to be a very interesting resource.
*once again, if you have an addition or a correction to the list, let me know in the comments, and I’ll add it. The idea is to make the list as accurate as possible, so I’ll gladly accept your help!
Nice list. Must have taken you a bloody hell of a time to get it together.
Good resource of sites. I never knew 71,000 people read a DumbLittleMan!
Stan,
This is a great list! Since you asked for additions, I’d like to mention Interesting Thing of the Day, which currently has 97,505 FeedBurner subscribers.
Cheers,
Joe Kissell
@Joe: thanks, I knew I must have missed some, especially since I’m a bit biased to technology related-sites. I will wait to see if there are more additions to the list, and then I’ll add all of them at once.
Hello Stan, thanks, very impressive numbers. I like this kind of posts. It makes me happy. It tells me i am reading ( or only subscribing?) good posts.
What’s crazy is how there is a top 3… which could be the only ones considered to have a subscription level high enough to be mainstream. Consider how many people are reached by a local free newspaper?
This must have been a pain in the butt to put together - good job!
I know that Elise Bauer is actually at #3 with 211K subscribers [www.elise.com/recipes/]. So although you have a very tech-focused list, there could be other niches that are under-represented.
I agree and do wish that FeedBurner would put together a top 100 list - it would be both helpful and inspiring (or depressing, depending on how you look at it, I guess!).
Great post. I bookmark the problogger, the other I just knew.
This list is useless statistically because it cannot possible measure the top 40 blogs by taking such a small sample. Sorry, but you should have tried scraping the web for feedburner URLs and then parsing the results.
Another reason for fudgy feed burner figures is people migrating RSS readers, ie moving from Bloglines to Googles Reader still makes them an active subscriber at both readers.
I posted about it a couple of weeks ago here http://www.devilworks.com/2007/03/04/fudgy-feedburner-figures/
You might want to add Geekzone (www.geekzone.co.nz) as #38 or #39
If I managed my Picks email newsletter through FeedBurner, I’d be over 100k.
Hey guys, it seems you only know english language blogs here…
Take a look outside, you will see big blogs like Techcrunch France (http://www.techcrunch.fr) which has 60514 Feedburner readers or Loic Le Meur (http://www.loiclemeur.com/france/) which has 14174 readers…
@everyone: thanks for your suggestions, I’ll add them to the list.
@Elliot: the list is useless statistically, I’m not denying that. Even if I had gathered all the top FeedBurner feeds with their feedcount turned on, there’s no saying that some publisher with a big number of subscribers won’t turn on their feedcount and thus change the actual list. The only such a list could be relevant would be if it were maintained by FeedBurner.
But that was exactly my point, to show that FeedBurner might (and perhaps should) start maintaining the list, as it might prove to be an important metric, especially in the future.
@Eric: I’ve omitted non-English blogs on purpose. It was hard enough to do the list as it is, and at one point I’ve considered focusing only on IT/tech blogs…but since most of the sites at the top are tech-related I’ve decided to leave it as it is.
I’m quite sure that with non-English blogs included the list would be much different. I hope the folks over at FeedBurner will take my hint and start maintaining the real list (;.
-I arrived here through problogger, glad I made it and also looked through your blog too. I wanted to comment and say thanks for the time you spent compiling the list of top 40 with rss using feedburner. I use feedburner myself. I know it took you at least a day….I subscribed to a few on the list so thank you too for introducing me to a few blogs that were new to me. And yes, I did subscribe to franticindustries
I just started my own blog a couple of days ago. Being a new blogger, I need all the help I can get! I am new to the whole blogging thing. I have always enjoyed forums, and when I finally visited my first blog I was hooked right from the start. My first blog that I visited was @ housevalues which is run by Matt on Marketing [dotblogspotdotcom) He and I used to work together on different teams at housevalues. I am now addicted, and am happy to contribute to this wonderful elite, and highly talented community of i-journalists.
As Eric said, the list is only in english… Let’s see global
You can find more on Feedburner’s subscribers here : http://www.ziki.com/people?ziki_order=audience
Associated to Technorati ranking :
http://www.ziki.com/people?ziki_order=rank
I’m impressed by the Asian Traffic also :
http://www.ziki.com/people?ziki_order=hits
Thanks for the cool list,I just subscribed some of them
hi great list ..thanx for compiling the list…
Stan - very good piece. Please continue the good work. It is really difficult for someone to sort through the “noise” in Web 2.0. I would challenge everyone of these blogs on the list (and ones not on the list) to be forthcoming on their traffic numbers - and posts such as this one can be one of many catalysts for fair disclosures.
Simple, yet a very good start!
Thats many subscribers, thanks for publishing…
385,000 readers! That leaves us little bloggers something to aspire to. Hopefully we get there someday, but either way it will be fun trying.
Very similar to Technorati’s top 100 blogs. Possibly a correlation!
Stan -
Impressive amount of work you put in to gather this together! As to why we’ve not put out a top ___ list in the past, it’s primarily due to the fact that (a) some publishers prefer not to share their stats, and (b) we’ve been more focused on building out a suite of tools to enhance feeds and sites, and (c) as some commenters have noted, we think that focusing on subscriber numbers alone can be misleading. (See my blog post from last month on this topic: http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/2007/02/feedburners_view_of_the_feed_m.php for more on that point.)
Also, wanted to correct one conclusion you drew:
“mainstream media publications - like NYTimes, Reuters, AFP - as well as big companies, like Microsoft and Google, rarely use FeedBurner. They probably want to have full control over their RSS feed themselves.”
Actually, this isn’t the case. 7 of the top 10 US newspapers (including USA Today, Wall Street Journal), several major news publications (like Newsweek), many of the major commercial tech publishers (Ziff Davis, IDG) and many other name brand publishers (even Reuters, who you named as not using FeedBurner) run all their feeds through us. In most cases, they simply choose not to enable our awareness API, which means that their data is not publicly shared.
We have a number of feeds with far higher subscriber numbers than the feeds above; some are major publishers’ feeds, some are large weblogs. For whatever reasons, they keep their data private, so they won’t show up on any “Top ___” lists.
Hope this is helpful info. As we noted last month, we’ve seen the total number of subscribers to all FeedBurner feeds crest over 50m individuals per day; that’s a huge number of people. And while we don’t manage all the feeds (far from it!), our broad cross-section of commercial publishers, large and small bloggers, and more than 80,000 podcasters means we’re a pretty good sampling of the overall feed market.
More interesting than the aggregate number of subscribers is the fact that many of those individuals are subscribed to non-tech, non-niche titles. RSS consumption is growing quickly, and is possible in an ever-growing number of applications and platforms. I think we’re rapidly approaching a point where many publishers - tech and non-tech alike - have more RSS subscribers than they have daily visitors to their site. What that does for a publishers’ overall strategy, and how that affects how they look at their feed, is where things get interesting.
Sorry for the long comment - it’s 70 degrees here in Chicago. I should get outside. Let me know if you have any other questions/comments.
–Rick Klau
VP, Publisher Services
FeedBurner
Hey there -
This is certainly a great list you have put together. Yes, our privacy policy prevents us from disclosing anything about a publisher’s stats without their permission, and that was a conscious decision on our part!
Keep in mind a couple things…
The sites here are just those that have used the “FeedCount Chicklet” to advertise their numbers. There are other directories and such that use the FeedBurner Awareness API to get further data.
See http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/developers/awapi
As far as non-English feeds, there’s a couple good lists in Italian and Spanish respectively at http://it.blogbabel.com/metrics/feedburner/ and http://top.blogs.es/metrics/feedburner/.
Also, you are correct that there are lots and lots of publishers that wish to keep their stats private. Some would break your top 40 and even perhaps your top 10. Many others would not!
Finally, many large commercial publishers do use FeedBurner. Reuters, USATODAY, and Dow Jones are just a few. You just don’t really see this because we allow any publisher to run their traffic through FeedBurner and keep it on their own domain with our MyBrand service. You can read all about MyBrand here: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/mybrand.
Keep up the good work!
Steve Olechowski
FeedBurner
@Rick: thanks for joining the conversation. Your input is very valuable and appreciated.
I’m well aware that there are many huge publications out there who belong to this list, however, they chose not to publish their RSS subscriber data. Engadget and Gizmodo come to mind, as well as dozens of others. And, you’re right: I should have put it differently when I’ve said that big publications often choose not to use FeedBurner. In fact, from my position they all may be using FeedBurner, I just don’t have any way to find that out.
I’d just like to comment on FeedBurner’s reasons not to maintain a top list. I understand that this hasn’t been your priority, and that some publishers don’t share their data publicly.
However, as you can see from the impact of this article, there’s a demand for this data, and where there’s demand there’s a business opportunity. Being an authority on who’s who in the RSS-subscriber-number world would surely attract new customers to FeedBurner. Even if some of the publishers choose not to disclose data; well, that’s their choice, but if disclosing data would mean being on the top of an important top list, maybe they would think twice about it.
Anyway, I’m really glad that you, as well as most other readers understood that my goal here wasn’t to provide a definitive top list. I wasn’t trying to provide answers, I was trying to ask the right questions.
In spanish: http://xataka.com/
WOW, thanks for taking the time to compile this list, it gives us a slight view of the top sites out there.
Interesting list. You are missing Writers Write’s feed which has about 13,300 subscribers.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/writerswrite
Someone should make an English list like the two feedburner lists for non-English feeds like Steve Olechowski mentioned.
is there any way to manipulate these stats? i mean a website owner can in some way change the numbers. and then you can be on top of the list.
Spanish FeedBurner ranking (a few of the top sites should be in your list)
http://es.blogbabel.com/metrics/feedburner/
Italian FeedBurner ranking
http://it.blogbabel.com/metrics/feedburner/
@Alex: you can manipulate the stats on your own website, but you cannot change the data provided by FeedBurner API. Also, the number of subscribers can be artificially increased to a certain degree. But this can be said about absolutely all other metrics in use today - number of visits, inbound links, etc.
@Greg: thanks for the suggestion, I will add it later today.
Political Wire should be on this list with approx 15,000 RSS subscribers.
thanks for posting this list. found this on the related! feedmashr.com
@Stan, definitely interesting to see this list! Also agree that tech blogs are over-represented, but that’s expected given your interest in the tech sphere and the higher rate of RSS adoption by tech blog readers. We tech people are in quite the bubble!
Anyways, we do publish feed subscription numbers for Gawker sites. The sub counts are taken straight from the Feedburner dashboard about once per quarter. Metrics for Gizmodo here:
http://www.gawker.com/advertising/titles/gizmodo
Looking beyond just the counts, feed readership patterns are best interpreted when site traffic numbers are available for review as well. A site with 10k feed subscribers / 500k monthly unique visitors is quite different from a site with 10k feed subscribers / 1 million monthly uniques.
@Erin: thanks a lot for the input. I was aware that Gizmodo (and other Gawker sites) is up there, and I can remember a couple of other sites who are up there as well, perhaps in the top 5. However, Gizmodo doesn’t have FeedCount enabled, so I couldn’t add you to the list.
Also, I agree that RSS subscriber number is just one metric to measure the popularity of a web site. I’ve seen sites with million daily uniques with ridiculously small numbers of RSS subscribers. But, you know as well as I that no serious advertiser will base his decisions based on one factor alone.
There’s a sign of hope for me. I’m sitting at 30 and climbing. =) Great post. Thanks.
Already down to 45th
I found one (1.6 million) bigger than all listed, but the author told me to hold my lip. If you don’t hear about it, then ping me again in a week or two.
@Randy: from what the folks from FeedBurner have told me, there are many that are bigger, they just don’t have FeedCount enabled. I don’t worry about it too much, as this list will never and can never be definitive. It serves a great purpose, though: we are all now able to track these 45 sites and see how their subscription number changes.
BTW, personally I am interested in a site with 1.6 million subscribers; of course, chances that I’m not already visiting it are small, but still, if/when you can share the info, please do.
Wouvv great links thnx alot…
Hi there… Posted before, but didn’t see an update. Check the Geekzone stats: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/geekzone?bg=99CCFF&fg=444444&anim=0
@M. Freitas: thanks, added.
Interesting comments..
FreeMacWare.com hovers between 13k and 15k subscribers.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/freemacware
Nice list.
Stan, nice job putting this list together.
I want to share a bit of advice about feeds that I learned the hard way. At Small Business Trends we lost thousands of subscribers back when the blog moved from Blogger to WordPress, since there was no server access to re-diect the blogspot Atom feed. (Not to mention losing traffic, Google page rank, Technorati links, and so on.) It’s taken a year to recover, and some things, like Technorati rank, never got back 100 percent to the way they were.
I wonder how many others out there are in the same boat with having had blogspot feeds that end up marooned? That alone is a good reason to get your own domain ASAP and move away from blogspot hosting.
Thanks for including Small Business Trends on the list.
Best,
Anita
My web site, the Double-Tongued Dictionary, has more than 18,504 subscribers today. It would be great to see it in the list.
Hey - thank you - you gave me a goal - now I know how much I have to do to get on that list
Great data!
Damn just missed the list, haven’t quite made it to 9000 yet.
Most is automatically added via Readers like Netvibes
how about www.earthshots.org? - photography
Peace people
We love you
Interesting that UberGizmo apparently has 16k subscribers?
Judging by the low pagerank and virtually zero comments on any story they will have nothing like that figure - how can they genuinely be getting 16 thousand subscribers and only 1 or 2 chose to comment?
It’s not asif gadget lovers don’t comment either check engadget or gizmodo they usually get hundreds of comments on each post
Hey bro
i think u have left out Digital Inspiration Of Amit Aggarwal out
Heres the link
http://labnol.blogspot.com
Thanx
Haroon
Live Score Sports http://www.featbet.com/en/
Great list! I have 14 subscribers, I’m gaining on you, Boing Boing!
I have done a similar experiment back in January. I am linking it through if anyone interested.
Sciencebase does not quite make the Top 40, we topped out at 2503 subscribers last week, with the usual weekend drop. We’re hoping to get to at least 3000 before year end, and there will be a special treat for subscribers when we do.
db
Good list….keep it up
thanks
Ich erklare meinen Freunden uber diese Seite. Interessieren!
finally feedburner is acquired by Google if i’m not mistaken.
sono eccitato circa questo luogo, buon lavoro!:)
Was kann ich sagen? Wirklich gute Arbeit erledigt mit dem Aufstellungsort…
Cool list, Thanks I didn’t know many of them, but know I subscribe some of them
Thanks
شادمانی بی سبب من و رضا
412,000 rss-readers!
I just can’t beloeve it.
You can also add Quick Online Tips with around 12000 subscribers.
http://www.quickonlinetips.com/
ComputerUser was started over 25 years ago with one goal. “To provide information on the latest technology tools and trends”. With this in mind we have provided quality award winning content. Now with the evolution of Web 2.0 the delivery of such content has changed how information is accessed and transferred. So now more than ever, our content is open to the public. To discuss, share, become and expert, etc. giving each article its importance and the author a significant following.
In this new internet era everybody is a computer user. So the focus of this sit is on “You” the user. We continue to look for innovative ways to deliver new products and services within the site. Your feedback will make this site your preferred location for interaction with your peers and fellow enthusiasts and make us grow as a company.
Best site. Thanks
(vacuum cleaner)
Looks like this list has changed a little…
I have done a similar experiment back in January. I am linking it through if anyone interested. ..
but your much on my mind, you often get declin. Liana Merete.
What’s crazy is how there is a top 3… which could be the only ones considered to have a subscription level high enough to be mainstream. Consider how many people are reached by a local free newspaper?
Films songs global foreign exchanges Games exciting world of free email services online shopping banks Visa electronic funds Kart online earn 5000 dollars months
ilovetypography.com?
10,000+
We currently have 14,622 Feedburner subscribers.
I think you need to re-order the list too.
Nice list.
I did more or less the same on feedcounts.com
I just made more categories.
It´s true. The technology blogs have way more subscribers then the others. We´ll see if this trend will continue in the future …
Nice list man.. keep it up