back in march, my friend and blogger extraordinaire, stan schroeder decided to test another metric for ranking site popularity. he created a list of top blogs based on the number of rss subscribers they had according to feedburner. apart from some shortcomings (i.e. since feedburner doesn’t release a list of its own and many sites don’t display the data publicly, the list would be incomplete, and that he only covered content written in english and on blogs) the list seemed like a great idea and got a lot of traction when it was initially posted. a more recent post by allen, however, has me rethinking my initial reaction to stan’s experiment.
allen asks the question, are ‘rss subscriber’ equal to ‘hits’? by hits, he is referring to the old and horribly inaccurate measure that would rate popularity based on the number of total elements retrieved from your site in a given time.
Add in another 10 blank gifs and you have 10 more hits per page load, awesome! Imagine if we had 100 blank gifs, even more awesome! And so the story goes. Luckily the industry quickly moved to page views. I still wonder how much was paid out due to the marketing of “hits” as a metric.
and now with still-inaccurate measures and new web technologies like ajax making the page view irrelevant, we find ourselves looking for other measures, one of which as stan decided to test, is rss subscribers.
the problem with rss subscribers, as allen points out, is that not all subscribers actively read the sites they are subscribed to. the more accurate measure, one that feedburner calculates and shows to the site-owner but doesn’t publicly report, is your site’s ‘reach’, calculated as the number of people who are actually taking an action on your content (viewing it within a reader or clicking on it to come to your site and reading it there).
If we look at popular start pages Netvibes and Pageflakes, both provide a set of default feeds upon initial page load. Using Pageflakes as the example, TechCrunch (the 580,000 listed above) is a default feed. This means that anyone who loads Pageflakes.com is now a Subscriber of the TechCrunch feed.
An example from Netvibes would be Yahoo Sports feed. And any load of Netvibes.com equates to another Subscriber for Yahoo Sports. With both of these sites having Alexa rankings under 10k, I can only imagine that they must see some nice traffic. But what happens if that new Netvibes user doesn’t click anything on the Yahoo Sports feed or minimizes it? They are still reported as a subscriber.
at the same time, it is important to note that the gap between subscribers and reach is significantly narrowed the lower down you go on the list popular blogs. the inflated numbers problem only applies to the top blogs that enjoy the luxury of being set as default on popular content aggregators and while rss subscribers maybe an inaccurate measure for these blogs, it may very well be a good measure for relatively less popular destinations.