Why I Don’t Care About Feed Subscribers Count
I’ve been using FeedBurner service for my blog feed for a some months. During this while I neither displayed my feed subscribers count publicly nor checked it seriously to know what’s going on the other end of the wire!
I never had any interest to know about the statistics of my blogs and personal sites. I see no reason to take care about them because they can neither change my passion for blogging nor add much money to my account for advertisements.
First I found FeedBurner via Scott when it wasn’t very popular. FeedBurner has had a great evolution over the past three years and I loved almost all their features and services but never could be convinced about the necessity and purpose of their subscribers count chicklet.
These days it’s very commonplace to put that chicklet on blogs to show about the subscribers count but I can’t believe about the accuracy of the statistics. There is no doubt that there is a fault that shouldn’t be very small.
There are many parameters in calculation of the subscribers count but one obvious reason that can affect this accuracy is the fact that some online aggregators do not display the number of subscribers in their client agent. Community Server roller application had such an issue so from all the subscribers for a feed on a certain site only one subscriber could be counted by FeedBurner.
Please don’t go wrong about my discussion because I like the idea of having statistics about feed subscribers and FeedBurner has done a unique job in this field but my argument is with having this chicklet that has become a good source for cheating in order to promote the value of a site or blog.
Over the last month we read some posts about a hole in FeedBurner that could let everyone hack the statistics and increase the subscribers count significantly. This bears a simple question and that is, how this counter can affect a site? There seems to be a simple answer and it is lied in the way that visitors think about this counter. Current writing is just a reminder to help change people’s mind and prevent such a prime! This counter can’t do anything unless visitors identify a good site via its subscribers count. It’s a simple and ancient tradition for people: do what others do! I recently noticed this on Twitter as well. Some of my followers have started to follow my friends and anyone who receives a reply by me! This always put a smile on my face with a question mark: what do they want to achieve with this?!
Beside all these technical details, there is also a conceal fact from people’s eyes. Does this counter represent the quality? Is it used to be a sign of popularity or quality?
Yes, this counter can be a good representative of popularity but I have doubt it can be a good sign of quality.
I read many blogs on a daily basis on my feed reader. Obviously I love them all because I’m not a guy who subscribes to a feed to mark its posts as read. Believe it or not but many of these blogs, whether a technical software development blog or an IT blog, don’t have frequent subscribers. You may argue with me on the point that I may be one of the few fans of those blogs because of my special interest but you’ll wonder if I say that many of these blogs are respected by adept people in the field.
Let me give an example! Moserware is a blog with occasional posts that is authored by Jeff Moser and I really love its content. I know that many of those well-known men including Jeff Atwood, Scott Hanselman and Phil Haack follow this blog, too. I’m sure you’ll love this blog if you already love some blogs like Coding Horror. At the time of writing, this blog has something around 700 daily subscribers that is really astounding for me!
I don’t want to lengthen this post with abundant discussions because I guess you have gotten the point to now. Let me say the word and ask you to reconsider your understanding of these subscribers count! Just trust on the content and read whatever you love to read. Never walk on other’s footsteps!
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3 Comments : 08.30.08
Feedbacks
It looks like that my ambivalence about using FeedBurner or sticking with my own feed generator/host
well its helps a lot i think people .
atleast feeds in email are very good atleast for visitors they want info in their mailbox see the number of techcrunch ,shoemoney and yaro etc feedburner subscribers.
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