Do you display your feed count?
November 17, 2007
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That’s the question that’s being asked over on Daily Blog Tips. For myself, I’ve displayed my feed count in the past, but haven’t since the changeover to the new theme. Sometimes it felt like the feedcount was a form of scoreboard, and a large drop in the number of subscribers would make me question what I posted to make people leave. Not that I would change anything, I just wondered what I’d said.I wasn’t aware at the time that it’s not the number subscribed that Feedburner counts, but rather the number of polls that it’s counted. For example, if a feed has 10,000 subscribers, but only 1,000 of them check feeds on the weekend, your weekend stats are going to look like crap. But come Monday morning, everyone’s going to love you again.
I don’t really worry about the number of subscribers that I have, although I know that they’re out there. This isn’t to say that I don’t check my Feedburner numbers - I do. But only about once a week when it pops into my head that I haven’t had a look in awhile.
And when it’s up, it’s great. But when it’s down, I don’t take it personally at all.
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November 17th, 2007 at 12:04 pm
I don’t display my feedcount because it’s too low, and I don’t see the point of showing it yet.
I have a few loyal readers who are bloggers, and my non-blogger readers like family members and friends are content in reading and browsing. They know nothing about RSS and stuff like that, so my feed count don’t matter as of now.
It feels great, though when I see the numbers go up. The feeling is that you wrote something substantial and people liked it. Like you, when numbers go down, I’m just curious why but I don’t take everything personally.
It’s just the way it goes in the blogosphere.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
It seems that showing the count encourages people to subscribe. I didn’t show mine until I had 150 (if I remember correctly) but if I could do it over, I would show it sooner.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Saedel,
Thanks for your comment. The numbers do seem to do strange things. On my personal blog, I unfortunately haven’t written anything in about a week but the number hasn’t gone down at all. Guess all those people are still at least polling the feed.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Court - Yeah, I don’t think that I’ll wait that long before I start showing the count, because I can see how it would encourage others to subscribe. I’ll probably start showing it once I can keep the number above 50. Right now with it being in the single digits, it probably wouldn’t be the best thing to advertise.
Thanks for the feedback. It’s very much appreciated.
November 17th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
I’m in the waiting-till-it-gets-high-enough category. I think it does encourage other to subscribe, it can also give you an idea if the blog you are looking at has any readership.
Do you think it would be unethical to fake (like Shoemoney did) a higher feed count till your number gets a bit higher?
November 17th, 2007 at 4:34 pm
I agree with Court - it does spur on subscriptions and I might be wrong but what is the harm in showing it from scratch? Since when did being “new” mean that you weren’t good. The top blog - engadget had 2 subscribers once - no shame in that at all.
November 17th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
Ethical? Not in the slightest. And if anyone were to do that and get higher advertising rates based on it, for example, that would pretty much have to be considered fraud, wouldn’t it?
November 17th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
I think 50 (+ or -) is a good number to display the number of readers. As for faking, I’ll be just fooling myself if I do that.
Besides, I’m not a full-time blogger to even consider that tactic yet. It’s useful for bloggers who are monetizing their sites in full-blast.
As for subscribing based on the number of readership, it is a different story that I also want to blog about.