Is blog RSS subscriber number a worthless metric now?

I used to check my RSS subscriber numbers daily and I used to sweat over those numbers. Did my last blog post work and increase my blog subscribers? What about that guest blog post I had on a popular blog, or what about when I hit the front page of Delicious?

How did it all affect my blog readership? Am I doing it well and is my blog readership growing? I was basically looking for all these answers in my blog RSS readership numbers.

I don’t do this anymore. Now, days can go by between my logins to FeedBurner. It is not that I don’t care about the progress of my blog, it is just that I find RSS subscribers number less relevant to the growth of a blog these days.

FriendFeed adding their subscribers to FeedBurner

Some weeks ago FriendFeed decided to add subscribers you have on their service to FeedBurner, so now all your FriendFeed subscribers are added on top of your RSS subscribers, which resulted in some very inflated numbers. I went from some 1500+ RSS subscribers to some 3000+ that same day.

It just shows how weak that metric was in the first place when it is so easy to add services to it. Just imagine if Twitter or some other application does the same thing.

It looks good to have these larger blog subscriber numbers, but it is fake as your Twitter followers or your FriendFeed friends are not subscribed to your blog the same way as someone who did it via a newsreader is.

Popularity of Google Reader

I used to read my feeds via a desktop based client, but some months ago I switched to Google Reader. It is so much easier and faster compared to desktop RSS newsreaders, and it is in a cloud in a browser wherever I go without having to download and install the software.

Google Reader has recently moved more into the social media territory. You can now “like” RSS articles and you can “share” them with your friends. So if I share an article in my Google Reader it will also show up in yours when you do your reading. See the blogging articles I shared recently.

I subscribe to several people via Google Reader and it is a very good experience. Someone like Louis Gray is very well connected and shares tons of interesting articles daily.

And this doesn’t only go for people. If you subscribe to RSS feeds of sites like Digg.com, Delicious.com or TweetMeme.com, you do get the most popular articles around the web.

All these subscriptions make me very well connected and informed, even though I am not subscribed to all the blogs that I end up reading regularly and I do not show in their RSS subscriber numbers.

Conclusion

So on one hand we have the inflated RSS subscriber numbers because of tools like FriendFeed, and on the other hand we have a completely new way of reading RSS feeds via social media and friend shares. All in all, there needs to be a better way of tracking the RSS readership than the current one. Maybe by page view as it is done with blog posts? I hope someone is working on a solution.

The alternative would be to go back to showing partial RSS feed and force people to click over to your blog to view the full article. Or let visitors subscribe to the email newsletter for the full articles. Doing this you would be able to get a more correct number of the readers of your content.

Image by Hamed