Thoughts on blog subscriber counts
I’ve been using Feedburner for over a year as a means to publish my blog posts as RSS feeds.
(If you’re not sure what RSS is, by the way, it’s a way to publish content over the Internet. People can get your blog posts, podcasts, etc. automatically either by E-Mail or by something called a RSS reader. This introduction to RSS will provide you with an overview of what it is and how to use it.)
Feedburner gives you the ability to, among other things, publicize how many people have subscribed to your blog’s RSS feed. It’s used as social proof, often to show progress over time or to market how well your blog is doing.
I’ve publicized my feed counts at some times and hidden them at others. Sometimes the numbers vary greatly for no apparent reason. The numbers can be inflated by various means (e.g. having the same person subscribe to your blog multiple times). It’s not a perfect system by any means.
At the same time, I don’t know of any better method to show what’s going on with subscriptions. If my numbers are flawed, I imagine everyone’s are flawed. It is what it is.
So…
I’m going to start displaying it again. Actually, I did a few minutes ago. Make of it what you will.
However… it is significantly bigger than when I started out and I think that’s a decent accomplishment.
Enjoy your day! Thanks for reading. And, hey, if you want an easy way to keep up to date on what’s happening at Broadcasting Brain, please click this link.
Ian Rountree:
FeedBurner counts hits on the page that come through RSS. I ran a test on this a few weeks ago – I subscribed to a sandbox blog in five places, and hit the page on different days from these places in different numbers. Firefox live bookmarks, an RSS pull on another site of mine as a control, Google Reader which I almost never load unless it's on purpose – the days I omitted loading Firefox and browsed with Chrome, that hit disappeared. Having intentionally counted my hits, the results were surprising. Inflating numbers works, but it's so damned time consuming, even as a week long test.
Incidentally, to the optimist, this means that 2447 number I see on your chicklet may mean many thousands of people subscribed who simply haven't hit your site today.
22 August 2009, 7:49 pmAdam Singer:
Feedburner count is pretty meaningless. It's not how many, it's who is reading your stuff
With that said I hope I've helped your numbers get up at least a little, I try to share your stuff when I can Mark – I'm one of your 'raving fans.'
22 August 2009, 11:54 pmMark Dykeman:
It is what it is.
23 August 2009, 1:31 pmMark Dykeman:
Thanks Adam, I really appreciate the support.
23 August 2009, 1:31 pmdigitalframeguy09:
Broadcast your self!
Digital Frame: http://www.digitalframeguy.com/
4 September 2009, 11:28 pm