Wondering Why The RSS Is Over 3,000?
written by John Chow
Ian from Internet Business made a comment in the Showing Some Community Love post that my RSS readership went from 2000+ to 3000+ virtually overnight. This is highly unusually because RSS readership normally goes down during the weekend. I know the reason why it went up but I forgot to write about it until the The Daily Kimchi reminded me.
The increased RSS subscriber count is due to Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage reporting feed counts - they never did this before. The announcement was made yesterday but did not take effect until today.
Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we’ve been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.
Judging by the increased RSS number, it looks like Google Reader accounts for 1/3 of all my RSS subscribers. That’s a pretty significant chunk! The number should be really impressive on Tuesday or Wednesday. That’s when Feedburner numbers hit their weekly peak.
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I noticed the same thing on my feedburner numbers. I didn’t hit as a high a number as you did but I did gain some.
agreed, my RSS feeds went up too this weekend which is way unheard of. thanks for pointing that out.
Cool, so that’s the reason why the count on my FeedBurner stats suddenly increased 25% today.
Cool John
That explains it, I was wondering why it was so big on my blog today.
Love the new layout
I also saw about a 30% increase. I about fell off my chair this morning with delight!
Sadly, this increase just makes it that much harder to catch up with you, John!
Alright, thanks John, that also explains some to me, I was already wondering on my stats well.
Alright! Cool… I’m also seeing an increase in subscribers - about 22% jump.
Thanks for the heads up.
The Google Reader fix put me at 666 feed readers … I’m coming after your evil throne Chow.
http://www.netbusinessblog.com/2007/02/17/google-feedreaders-displaying-in-feedburner/
I am using Opera offcourse
My subscriber no. also went up, by a bit. But, its still pretty much nothing. Its about 53 (duh! thats embarrasing when compared to yours).
That makes a lot of sense. I noticed a surge in RSS readers across a couple of my blogs and was wondering why myself.
I too was pleasantly surprised when my stats had gone up by 40% this morning. Feels kinda weird not knowing about all those readers all this time. Are all the major feed-readers now included in Feedburner-stats or do I have even more readers lurking?
Darn mine didn’t go up very much haha.
Google’s Feed Reader Market Share is Huge
A lot of bloggers who use FeedBurner got a nice surprise this morning. One of the great features of FeedBurner is the stats they provide on the number of readers of a given RSS feed. The only problem is that for web-based newsreaders/aggregators they…
Same thing happened to me, I jumbed from 800 to 1300.. not bad
that looks good !! nice
It’s about time Google did this.
It seems like this was one of the only areas Google missed–and missed out big on.
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next week as everyone gets a better idea as to how many people have really subscribed to their RSS feeds. Google has such a large market share that I’m surprised it’s taken this long for them to do this.
I’m a part of that extra 1000 subscribers
Thanks for making this clear John, mine doubled overnight as well, I was linked here, at problogger and Google made that change so I’ve witnessed a pretty good bump in the count.
Allen.H
wish mine jumped that much! Thanks for the heads up about Google.
I use google reader, though for this blog and one other, I usually visit the site direct, as google reader doesnt update frequently enough.
Good news. Will be interesting to see what effect it has across my blogs.
Sweet, my feed cpunt went up to.
Thanks for the shout out, John!
This is fantastic news for everyone.
Especially for Darren Rowse. His feed counter jumped from 10 000 to 18 759 subscribers
My own counter jumped, too. It was 200% increase!
…from 4 to 12 subscribers
I was one of those using Google Reader.
It’s comprehensible. Google Reader rocks
[...] Wondering Why The RSS Is Over 3,000? « John Chow dot Com Google Reader is now providing feedback on consumption of RSS feeds. As a result, many people saw their Feedburner stats jump overnight. My stats jumped to 245, about twice what they were. John’s went up over a thousand! (tags: feedburner analysis analytics rss feed) [...]
I’m new to John Chow dot Com and I’m not sure if you’ve mentioned it.. but any reason why the subscribers go down during the weekend?
Do people unsubscribe accidentally and then only realize their mistake on Tuesday?
Oh no, they just have better things to do on the weekend. It’s obivious they read news at work on Monday, and Feedburner counter shows them on Tuesday
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