Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed

Re: Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed

cool — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 13:02:04 -0000

If I want to measure how my blog is really doing I guess I'll start subtracting my FF follower count from my subscriber number. While including FF may indicate potential reach, I'd think it highly likely that many blog posts go unnoticed. Between my Tweets, delicious saves, Flickr uploads, etc. each blog post becomes just one tiny link in a crowded stream. It's not as though my FF followers chose to follow my blog specifically, they just chose to follow me.

And in many cases, especially with newer users, they simply chose to follow anyone with a FF account that they were already following on Twitter, Facebook, etc. So even then they didn't choose me for my FriendFeed activity or my brilliant blog posts, they just found it was easy to import their existing friends.

I follow far fewer people on FriendFeed than on Twitter, because there is so much more content and it would be harder to keep up with a bigger crowd, even when sorted into groups. Now, if I wanted to boost my RSS numbers all I'd have to do is have FF start following everyone I'm following on Twitter. A good percentage of these would start following me back and my numbers would grow. But increasing numbers this way is rather artificial and meaningless.

What I like about normal subscriber numbers is that they show an indication of interest by the reader. If someone really subscribes, it means they've taken action to ensure they can follow posts in the future. The inflated numbers merely indicate that somewhere along the way they chose to follow me somewhere for reasons that may have nothing to do with my blog.

I think that's the significant bit, my FriendFeed numbers are a measurement of my overall Internet activities, not just the blog. If I had multiple blogs, they'd all share the same inflated numbers. One can't really measure the success of blog A vs. B if they are sharing the same data. How would a car company decide which model to keep and which to eliminate if they couldn't measure the Mustang and Focus sales separately? They couldn't. Big numbers may be nice for our egos, but they're not really useful as tools to measure success.

Re: Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed

Reid — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:39:35 -0000

This really bugs me. It's a cheap ploy by FriendFeed to promote their service, but it's really sloppily done. All it's doing is taking the number of friends that you have on the FF account that you're piping your RSS feed into and adding that to the subscriber numbers.

The theory is that this is how many people are seeing your feed, but that's what Feedburner's "reach" stat is for. Kim Kardashian and Robert Scoble are both "following" my FriendFeed, but no way they're seeing my blog posts. In fact, referrals to my site from FriendFeed are zero.

The subscribers stat in Feedburner should measure (as accurately as possible) the number of people who actively subscribed to that one feed. Sure, they may not ever open their reader again, but it at least suggests a level of interactivity. Meanwhile, on FriendFeed, there's plenty of people just padding their follow numbers.

So I'd be fine with the subscribers stat counting FriendFeed as one subscriber or user of the feed, but taking the people following me and calling them "subscribers" is ridiculous. It just seems like a desperate move on FriendFeed's part to exaggerate their relevance.

Re: Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed

Robin Ng — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:32:04 -0000

no wonder....i have additional 50++ RSS subscriber in a week time. thanks for sharing this!

Re: Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed

AdamPieniazek — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 02:46:58 -0000

True Adam (great name btw), but subscribing / keeping a default feed shows some low level engagement level. Maybe they don't read it now but will down the line.

I like the addition, but it belongs in a reach category, not subscribers. Ideally, feedburner would spit out number of feed subscribers, number of social reach, and number of sites where you content is re-published. Give a total but split up these three different areas too,

Re: Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed

justinlevy — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:10:52 -0000

Thanks for the info Adam! Right before reading this post I had logged into Feedburner and was very curious why my numbers had tripled. I like your suggestion of a new measure of publisher influence. It makes me think of the recurring issues with Technorati and how trust in that service continues to diminish as well.

Re: Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed

Adam Chandler — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:12:38 -0000

yeah it happened to me too. Just saw the jump.

That's crazy. good for numbers but my actual clicks to stories via RSS readers is actually down.

http://twitpic.com/7qc16

Re: Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed

Adam Ostrow — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:41:53 -0000

The same could be said for RSS subs tho ... just because they're subscribed doesn't mean they read it. Not to mention the blogs that get included as "defaults" in various RSS readers which can hugely inflate numbers.

Re: Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed

Brian Cray — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:38:00 -0000

"Enjoy your inflated numbers" is a problem. There needs to be a new measurement. If we're just inflating numbers, we aren't getting a real idea of blog growth and operating under false information.

When I saw my inflated numbers this morning it through me off. When I saw it was all from Friendfeed all of my trending capabilities are now shot.

Re: Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed

Hemant Kumar Singh — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:33:10 -0000

even Brian (@copyblogger) got a 2.5k increase in his readership & i was about to congrats him for that

Re: Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed

AdamPieniazek — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:25:05 -0000

It makes sense and it doesn't. A lot of people say they dropped their rss reader for twitter/friendfeed (I am not one of them, my rss reader plays a different role than twitter/friendfeed for news aggregation). We should be able to track people subscribing to our sites via twitter/friendfeed but engagement is a more important metric. How many of those people subscribed to your twitter/ff actually read your blog?