A number of my favorite bloggers have noticed their feeds have increased. I’ve also noticed a shift. The reason for it is because Google is now reporting feed subscriber counts. And it’s about time. I’m a huge metrics nut so its not to early for this.
In response to requests from probably thousands of other online publishers, Google announced today that it will begin reporting the number of subscribers any RSS feed has through Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage. Other feed reading Google products may be included in the future but these are the two big ones.
FeedBurner requires reporting from feed reader vendors in order for their subscribers to be counted. Feedburner’s Rick Klau said this morning that the Google announcement is good news but reminded readers that Feedburner offers additional statistics including the number of subscribers who actually view your feed and click throughs on individual items.
Originally posted on February 17, 2007 @ 7:31 am
Lighter Footstep is only two weeks old, so the new subscriber number numbers really stick out. Google upped us by almost 50% — double the reach of Bloglines. There’s clearly been a sea change in the world of online RSS aggregators.
I actually talked about this today, in terms of what it’s done to b5’s numbers: http://www.ensight.org/archives/2007/02/17/google-worlds-1-feed-reader/.
Basically, Google is now well above Bloglines across our network. So much so that in almost every channel it’s in the top 3 (while Bloglines is only there for 5 channels).
Realistically – I’m an avid user of Bloglines … that’s no secret – but, perhaps some people should know that I am also duplicately subscribed in google reader, and 2 other feed reader programs … It doesn’t take a genius to see that there are potential duplications out there… Why do you think it fluctuates so much each day?
Of course, not in my lot of blogs … I didn’t even notice any difference *sniffles*