I almost had a heart attack on Thursday night when I went to check my Feedburner Stats. I had been hovering around 60 subscribers with one or two added every week. But that night, Feedburner was reporting that, suddenly, I had 354 subscribers.
What had happened? Did my blog get recommended in some influential blogger’s list? Had my blog been mentioned in the New York Times?
With a grain of salt in my mouth, I went to check the details of these new readers. Turns out FriendFeed was a big Pacman figure on the pie, reporting 302 subscribers, which of course matched the number of followers of my FriendFeed.
I started digging around on FriendFeed and found Louis Gray and others talking about this change of reporting and finally, the official FriendFeed post announcing this. Some bloggers were really pissed about it.
My first reaction to the whole thing was anger; this is not real data. It’s fake inflation that will obscure my visibility on what’s really going on with my blog. I thought about removing my blog link from FriendFeed but then the data was already there.
But after a couple of days thinking about it, I can honestly say FriendFeed numbers are, in a broad way, as valid as of any other RSS reader.
Rob Diana makes a great point in his post:
I know FriendFeed can drive some good traffic to the blog, but returning a subscriber count for the blog does not seem quite right. FriendFeed is an aggregator, so my subscribers are really subscribing to me, not my blog.
On the other hand, though, if you and your blog are one (which is my personal case) and my blog headlines are being seen along with other headlines (which is what happens in any RSS reader as well as in FriendFeed) there is a valid point that people are subscribing to my content and could be counted as part of my audience.
RSS is, in internet years, an old technology that was never meant to be measured. Feedburner and all other RSS measuring tools, compile data from the HTTP hits to your feed URL, and then manipulate this data to come up with an approximation of an audicence. This is by no means certain and will not tell you how many times, for example, users only saw the headline and how many times they actually opened your post in their reader. If you offer full posts in your feeds, all these activity is lost. We might need a new technology to handle blog content consumption, but at this time, this is more wishful thinking than anything else.
Friendfeed subscribers are very hard to obtain. If someone subscribes to you it’s because they really like your content. It’s not like in Twitter, where following someone is not something you give thought to (at least the majority doesn’t), but in FriendFeed, people are much pickier, and subscriber counts are much more reduced.
If people are being exposed to my blog headlines, no matter if it’s on an RSS reader or FriendFeed, they should be counted as potential audience. At the end of the day, the much more important metric to measure is the actual visits to your blog and how often they visit afer that.
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