Counting subscribers …
October 15th, 2007 by marc
Pete Cashmore has written a dynamite post about the validity of subscriber counts from blog aggregators, and by extension from BlogRovR which deserves a considered response and an explanation of how BlogRovR approaches this task.
Stowe Boyd and others have also joined in the conversation.
The short story:
- Subscriber counts from most feed aggregators can easily include people who never see the content in the blog.
- BlogRovR counts are more reflective of real readers, because a subscriber in BlogRovR will always be shown content from subscribed blogs wherever it is relevant. You can’t subscribe to a blog in RovR without seeing its post summaries in your tray when you visit something they’ve blogged about.
- BlogRovR, as well as other feed aggregators/readers is prone to reporting subscribers who are inactive for long periods. Better heuristics regarding access would work, but we haven’t tackled this issue.
Being bundled in something like Google Reader doesn’t mean that a subscriber will ever see your content.
With BlogRovR, being in the default bundle means as people browse anything on the web about which you’ve blogged, they’ll see your blog posts. Which in my book is excellent value to both bloggers and readers alike—contextually relevant posts.
When you write about something I care about, that’s when I see what you’ve written, even if I don’t read all of your blog all the time. And if I did read something and forgot, I’ll see it again when I need to remember.
The advantage that BogRovR provides is that today’s scenario for dealing with RSS feeds is:
Read copiously, remember encyclopedicaly, hope to recall what was interesting next time you see something relevant. Fail repeatedly (unless you’re Scoble and have total recall).
With BlogRovR:
Subscribe copiously, browse judiciously, receive interesting blog posts selectively.