For many bloggers, RSS subscriber numbers are a fun and useful way to get an approximate read on how many “loyal customers” they have. For others, however, RSS numbers take on a greater significance, impacting such things as advertiser and investor relationships, as well as a web site’s perceived influence.
For example, when you visit TechCrunch and note that it has north of two million RSS subscribers according to its FeedBurner chicklet, it stands to impress and make you give its articles a degree of consideration that you may not lend to web publications with a lower subscriber count.
So this is all to say that RSS subscriber numbers are a pretty big deal on the Internet. But how are RSS subscriber numbers calculated, can they be trusted, and what do they really tell us? And while FeedBurner is certainly the industry leader in “burning” RSS feeds for web publishers and providing subscriber counts, what are the alternatives?
Unfortunately, there’s no easy or simple way at present to provide RSS subscriber numbers other than as an approximate snapshot of how many people are actively subscribed to a feed at any given point in time.
Confused yet? The FeedBlitz blog (FeedBlitz is a Feedburner competitor) does the best job I’ve seen in explaining how subscriber counts are tallied in a piece called “On RSS Subscriber Counts and FeedBurner Metrics“:
First a backgrounder. When you read your feed, it’s been fetched from the source (such as FeedBurner or FeedBlitz’s new FeedBurner alternative) and delivered to you by a piece of software: your browser; your online RSS service; your desktop client or a search engine or something else. Think of these different pieces of software as vehicles loading up newspapers at your newspaper’s printing plant. Some, like Google Reader, are big trucks and take lots of newspapers for delivery to lots of subscribers; some are just individual subscribers (e.g. individual FeedDemon users) in their virtual cars taking just their own copy.
When these aggregators visit FeedBurner or Feedblitz, we have to decide a few things when figuring out your subscriber count. Firstly, is it an aggregator / feed reader at all, or simply a search engine? This matters because search engines aren’t directly contributing to circulation, so they don’t affect subscriber counts just because they’re scanning your feed for others to find later. The hit is noted but that’s about it.
Interest in how RSS subscriber counts are produced increased recently when FeedBurner experienced another of its periodic “dips” in which many bloggers and web publishers saw an unexpected drop in subscriber numbers for a few days.
After a Feedburner subscriber “plunge” in November 2007, Search Engine Land ran a story on why subscriber numbers sometimes fluctuate, writing, for example, that “a service may not report numbers one day for some reason internal to that service.”
So even though sudden drops in RSS subscriber numbers can seem random, the ways in which subscribers are counted is a complex task, with many factors — from a vast forest of RSS readers with varying standards to technical outages on multiple fronts that are not the fault of the RSS stats provider — impacting on the seemingly simple number of subscribers that appears on someone’s blog or web site each day.
Nonetheless, because the relative accuracy of RSS subscriber numbers are taken so seriously, blogger Louis Gray sees an opening for FeedBlitz to become “a much-needed alternative to FeedBurner.” And as the comments thread on a TechCrunch piece from January called “FeedBurner Needs To Get It Together” attests, many people are frustrated with FeedBurner but are not (yet) aware of a clear alternative.
It will be interesting to keep an eye on whether FeedBurner can change the perception from some that it needs to “get it together,” and if FeedBlitz or other services can gain market share in the meantime.
Thanks to Eric Berlin
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