If you blog, and haven’t checked out FeedBurner yet, you should. Not only can it offload the majority of the bandwidth from a busy blog (not mine), but the stats it collects are impressive. They do a lot of work to display meaningful and correct stats, and even with that effort it’s always “approximate” due to many factors outside FeedBurner’s control. For example, RSS aggregators (like Google Reader) make one “hit” to your RSS feed on behalf of N number of subscribers. In those cases, the aggregators do (or should) pass along the number of subscribers it’s collecting for, but even then, each aggregator is different. Some pass along average subscriber counts instead of actual. One can only guess what each aggregator does. Google, for example, includes everybody who has subscribed to your feed in their reader and via the personalized home page. So if you happen to add a feed to each, you’ll be counted twice.

But I digress. I really wanted to talk about one of my favorite FeedBurner features: the “FeedCount” badge.

(Yes, my stats are shameful compared to Scott’s and Jeff’s, respectively – but so is my blog!)

I find it really interesting to see how many people subscribe to a particular blog. In fact, I have to admit that if I stumble across a new blog with a FeedCount badge indicating 500+ readers (1000+ is better), I’m much more likely to subscribe than if it has say 13 readers, or even 100 or 200. I will at least subscribe for a while, reasoning that “a thousand people can’t be wrong”. This just in: you better believe 1000 people can be wrong.

Mike Hall and I were jokingly-yet-seriously wondering a while back what would happen if we displayed, say, Atwood’s FeedCount badge on our blogs with a link to our RSS feeds? Of course we’d never do that, but I seriously think it would have an impact on the number of people that say “huh, this guy must be on to somethin’ — *subscribed*” based purely on the perceived popularity of the blog. There’s really nothing to stop anybody from doing right now, except turning off the FeedCount feature altogether in your FeedBurner settings.

When I come across a blog that has a FeedBurner RSS URL but no FeedCount, my curiosity is instantly piqued. So that drove me to create a special page for all the curious folk out there: “How many people subscribe?“

But you don’t even need to visit the page! Just enter a feed in the Web 2.0-ish text box below, or you can enter a link from a feedburner feed item, click “Get It”, and the subscriber count will be displayed–if the feed author has enabled the FeedCount feature. Give it a try!

1. Chris Says:
   December 12th, 2007 at 2:12 am

   I really like the idea of placing the Feedburner badge on my site but I am embarrassed that I don’t have many (possible no one) subscribed to my blog. Thus my site would be one of those that you passed up because of the low number of subscribers! =)

   By the way, have you checked out ComeSTAT? Worth a look, as it’s very handy…

2. New "sub-blog" at weblogs.asp.net | Aaron Lerch Says:
   December 13th, 2007 at 4:16 pm

   [...] aaronlerch.com and “starting fresh” at weblogs.asp.net – another great thing about using a service like FeedBurner is that it makes moving my feed around seamless, regardless of whether a new host supports 301 [...]