Feed subscriber counts: On being reduced to a number
Wed 14 Mar 07 21:33 | Tags: Advertising/Promotion, Blogging, Meta
Web feeds are waeome. Instead of opening your web browser and hitting up every single web site you want to read in sequence, you can just open up your feed reader and let the content of several, dozens, or hundreds of web sites come to you, automatically. It's easy to scan through a site's headlines to find articles you're interested in and ignore articles you don't. Consider it a tool for increasing your daily productivity and making it a little bit easier to handle internet information overload, or consider it web surfing for the lazy; either way, once you give it a try, you just might find yourself addicted.
Vienna is my feed reader of choice.
RGR of course has a feed. Like many bloggers, I use FeedBurner to handle my feed; they basically take the "raw" feed from my blog software and can improve and promote it in various handy ways, and it's all free. If you're a blogger, I suggest looking into using FeedBurner; it's pretty cool.
One of FeedBurner's many features is statistics. At the most basic level, they can tell you how many people have subscribed to your feed in a feed reader. I'm not sure exactly how they do this; supposedly they'd count the number of unique IP addresses are making repeated requests for the feed or something, but I can't figure a way they'd do it that wouldn't be at least somewhat imprecise. They allow you to place a dynamic image on your site that represents how many subscribers your feed currently has. Like many bloggers, I use this feature; if you're not reading this article in a feed reader, you can see this for yourself in the menu to the left. As of yesterday (Tuesday) I have a whopping nine subscribers, though at one point, soon after I started using FeedReader, I had up to nineteen; this was probably an anomaly of some sort (and another reason why I think their count is an educated estimation at best). Still, aside from that odd spike, the number has been slowly increasing.
Maki, the author of marketing blog Dosh Dosh and the only serious blogger I know of that starts all of his posts with a picture of a random anime girl for no particular reason, uses FeedBurner as well, but he does not divulge his subscription numbers. He gives his reasons why in a recent post (which I read in my feed reader!).
The reason behind [not revealing subscriber counts] is very simple. I don’t want the feed count to be an initial factor in motivating readers to subscribe to Dosh Dosh.
My opinion is that some readers are more likely to subscribe to a blog if it has a large subscriber base. This is probably because a large feed count somehow validates the readability and worth of a blog in some way.… I would prefer that readers subscribe to Dosh Dosh… primarily because of the content and not because it appears to be popular with other readers.
He then decides to turn the issue into a "meme," which is blogger-speak for an issue that someone writes about just because someone else has written about it. It's a good scheme, actually, because he knows that, to properly address the issue, I have to link to the entry on his blog that I'm addressing, and I can also get a link from his blog in the deal. There's very little overlap on the subject matter of our respective blogs, but if I can get just one extra regular reader out of the deal, I think it's worth it, so please pardon the slightly self-indulgent nature of this post.
So here's his main question:
“Why do you display (or not display) the Feed Count for your blog?“
Well, Maki… Let's go back to what you said above, about a large subscriber count validating the worth of a blog. I think that's true, to a certain extent; and that's why I do it.
Ups and downs. (I think last Monday was another anomaly…)
I sort of have the opposite issue, though; my count is in the single digits. If we say that a large count is representative of a quality blog, then you could extrapolate that my blog is pretty crappy because of its low count. But here's the trick; people are only going to see that count when they're at my blog anyway. Whether they came from a link on another blog, or a search engine query, or an ad I'm running, they're going to be seeing my content as well as my count. And maybe I'm giving people too much credit, but I'd like to think that they'll be able to make their judgments on the quality of my blog from its content than from its count; and if they find the quality sufficient, then subscribe on that bit of information alone. The popularity of any given thing is not always proportionate to its quality.
In other words, I'd like to think that people are smart enough that they're going to decide to subscribe to a blog's feed based on that blog's quality and relevance, not on how many other people have subscribed before them. After all, isn't that why you, Maki, subscribed to the feeds you've subscribed to? It's why I subscribed to yours…
So if I don't think it matters that much to potential subscribers, why do I show the number at all instead of just keeping it private? Arrogance! Pride! I may only have eight other people that are currently subscribed to my feed (I myself am one of the nine), but, darn it, I'm darn proud of those eight! I managed to convince -- to prove -- to eight people that I'm a capable writer, a producer of quality relevant information; I've convinced them so much that they now almost literally hang on my every word by having my articles automatically delivered right before their wise eyes every time they switch to their feed reader. I'm awesome!
And if I wake up tomorrow and find out I have nine or ten or eleven subscribers, I'm going to be even more proud! And if I wake up tomorrow and I have seven or six or five, I'm going to be shamed and make an effort (though probably not too much effort) to figure out why it's gone down and what I need to do to stop the number from decreasing in the future. Just as you stated, that number is an indicator of a blogger's worth, for better or for worse, so why should I not be proud of it? I'm sure you weren't expecting an answer as simplistic as "I'm arrogant," but, well, there you go.
Update: I'm up to eleven now! Woo hoo, back in the double digits! I am so awesome!
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A very well written post and I like your comment about the cleverness of 'memes', today was the first time I'd ever heard of the term, i wonder what the origin is
Its a good point about people reading your content upon arrival and deciding for themselves. Also i think sometimes we get numbers distorted in our heads on the internet, the other day I logged in to my stats was like 'booo only 200 people visited yesterday' and then i thought, hang on a moment 200!! Two hundred people! That's a lot of people. If two hundred people were standing in front of me that would be a lot of heads, who am I to say 'only 200'...
its a funny world the internet!!
#2 | Garrett Albright | 16 Mar 07 00:42
Wiktionary's article on the word has some guesses as to its origin, but nothing for sure. It's an English neologism, that's for sure.