I can’t quite figure out what the disconnect is between the stats I see in Feedburner, and the stats I see in Google Reader for subscribers to OIM.
Feedburner:
FB displays over 3100 subscribers, with the clear majority using Google Reader or iGoogle. More specifically, 2517 readers are using a Google product to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/overheardinminneapolis.
Google Reader:
The “show details” info in Reader displays only 368 subscribers of that feed. Now, I switched to Feedburner in March of 2008, almost two years after the launch, and I set up a forward for the old atom feed, so maybe Feedburner is collecting the data from that feed as well, which is very cool, but it still doesn’t totally add up.
Google Reader (atom feed):
The two feeds together only total a little over 2100 subscribers, but FB tells me 2500+ are using Google. I may be wrong about this, but I don’t think iGoogle has a separate feed count. If you view the feed in iGoogle, it should be reflected in the Reader “show details” count. So, 400+ subscribers aren’t showing up in any stats. Or have I thought too much about this and I’m missing something really obvious?
The other confusing thing is that, according to Google Reader, since March of 2008 only 368 people have subscribed to the new FB feed using Reader, but I have gained 2200+ total subscribers between then and now, and we know that most of them are using Google. Did several hundred people manually type in http://www.overheardinminneapolis.com/atom to subscribe, instead of using the link posted, or the browser default? (and yes, the default subscribe link in your browser points to FB, not the atom feed) I find that difficult to believe.
The only reason I started thinking about this is OIM’s appearance in Newsbobber’s Top 100 Minnesota Blogs (61st.) The ranking is figured based on number of subscribers, Google PageRank, and number of inbound links.
This is the ranking information pulled for MNSpeak, which is currently at #6.
Google PageRank: 3 Google Reader Subscribers: 1143 (August 2009) Inbound Links: 26399
This is OIM’s:
Google PageRank: 5 Google Reader Subscribers: 304 (August 2009) Inbound Links: 40853
As of the last import, they display 304 subscribers, so they’re using the FB feed for that number. Obviously that’s not accurate, and I just don’t know how to go about fixing it. If it were corrected, OIM would jump up a few ranks.
Any ideas?
2 Responses
Interesting post. I just recalculated your Newsbobber score using the atom RSS feed. OIM jumped way up in the rankings … to the Top 10. That’s more like it! Seriously, though, your post highlights a pitfall of using RSS subscribers as a metric. In theory, it makes sense. In practice, it’s impossible to get comprehensive numbers for every blog. The reason I’m using GR subscribers is that the number is public for any feed you plug into the Reader. I know that Feedburner stats are public for some blogs, but that’s an opt-in system. So I could get that better subscriber number for some blogs, but not others. In the end, I decided to include GR subscribers in my formula because it’s apples-to-apples for all blogs. A further caveat, as your post explains, is that the GR count will vary depending on which feed is in the reader … some blogs have RSS, RSS2, atom, etc … that each has its own subscriber count. Using GR as a metric is definitely not perfect, and I may drop it at some point. Questions like the ones you raised are welcomed!
Hi, Bob! Thanks for the response. I was not expecting the recalculation, but I definitely appreciate it. Now I’d like to get Google Reader and FeedBurner on the same page with their stats. It’s probably much easier said than done.
I later went back and plugged /feed into GR to see if that’s where my missing few hundred were, but that feed only had about 3 subscribers, so I’m still perplexed about the differences. What I’d like to see FB eventually do is display each feed for which it’s collecting data and a count of each set of subscribers. (X amount are subscribed to /rss, /rss2, /feed, /atom, and the FB feed.) I’d also love a really simple way of consolidating all feeds into the one so that the stats of each one are the same as any of the others.