Comments on: Is blog RSS subscriber number a worthless metric now?

By: Santosh Puthran

Santosh Puthran — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:55:22 +0000

To some extent subscriber to RSS feed is a worthless metric. People who subscribe to RSS feeds subscribe to lot information and they have too much information and no time to read.

I feel a good metric of the site is whether the readers have drilled down the site and read more on the website.

Cheers,

Santosh Puthran

By: Mayur

Mayur — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 12:01:40 +0000

Agree, I too consider that Friendfeed subscribers are not genuine feed readers.

By: Marko Saric

Marko Saric — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:56:11 +0000

Everyone who is your friend at Friendfeed counts so if you have 1000 friends there it is 1000 subscribers on Feedburner. Very fake number for rss subscribers as they are not actually subscribing to it.

I think the reason is page views. Some bloggers sell ad space and in that case page views are monumental so they try to force everyone to read the article directly on their blog.

By: Mitch

Mitch — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 12:37:25 +0000

I'm one of those people who's sticking with the desktop based client instead, not necessarily because I don't like Google Reader, but because I like the separation in not having to open my browser to have to read stuff. I'm probably going against the current, but then I've never been all that good at doing what everyone else is doing anyway.

As for RSS subscribers, I guess when one gets to at least 1,500 that they can afford not to look at how many people are following them. I'm still reaching to get that first 100 number, so I added the subscriber icon to my blog so I don't have to go looking it up; it's just always there. I'm not sure it does any good or not, but it keeps me from going to Feedburner every couple of hours just to see where I stand.

By: jonathan_rivera

jonathan_rivera — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 09:13:01 +0000

I was trying to figure out what happened at my blog when my RSS subscribers jumped from 40 to 740 in just one day. I noticed the same thing, friendfeed.

How do those numbers actually work? How can I see all the people who are subscribed to me in friendfeed?

As for Google Reader, it's my primary source of information. I use it every morning for an hour to keep up with what's going on. As a matter of fact, I got this article through my reader and then decided to visit so I could comment.

One thing that I have noticed in Google Reader is that some people are now only offering part of their content, forcing you to go to their site to get the rest of the story. I'm of the opinion that this is ridiculous. Why shouldn't I be able to read the whole story in my reader??? Is it just because they want the visits to their site?

If the content is strong enough I will hop out of my reader to comment, but I don't like being forced to visit, it defeats the purpose of the reader...why bother having the RSS feed then? What's your take on this?

By: phamquochuy2008

phamquochuy2008 — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 07:10:53 +0000

I used this tool, but not receive lot subscriber, and your post help me again view, tks!

By: Christian

Christian — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:44:22 +0000

I thought that was wierd when they made that switch. I hadn't heard about it beforehand. I've never given too much thought to the true value of rss subscriptions. To me, it means that people have found my content valuable enough to subscribe. So if I have one rss subscriber, I think that totally rocks, but am I going to obssess over how to get that number as high as possible? Why should I?

By: Marko Saric

Marko Saric — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:21:16 +0000

It was actually FriendFeed that decided to add their stats to FeedBurner. Not sure how it is done exactly but it seems to be fairly simple and Google doesn't seem to mind. So yeah, it seems that other platforms like Twitter could do the same thing…

By: Marko Saric

Marko Saric — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:20:04 +0000

True. Some people do prefer to get their news via RSS so probably not the best option to restrict it, but maybe best to focus on email more than on RSS when promoting subscription methods. But of course if tracking could be changed, it would be perfect.

By: Marko Saric

Marko Saric — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:17:34 +0000

I feel the same way about Google… they keep delivering great tools and Google Wave promises to be another one I will use…