The Feed Count Meme: Studying the Impact of Feed Count on Blog Feed Subscriptions

Most of the blogs I read currently display their Feedburner feed count publicly and I’ve always been curious about the rationale behind it. Is it just for bragging rights? Or does displaying your feed count encourage more readers to subscribe to your feed while revealing the popularity of your blog?

I thought of writing an article on it but decided that structuring it as a meme will help to stimulate more debate on this issue.

I’ve also always been really interested in the amount of effort and time each blogger took to reach their current feed count. Perhaps an interactive blog meme will allow each blogger to shed some thoughts on their subscription building strategies as well.

Why I don’t Reveal the Feed Count for Dosh Dosh

The reason behind this is very simple. I don’t want the feed count to be an initial factor in motivating readers to subscribe to Dosh Dosh.

My opinion is that some readers are more likely to subscribe to a blog if it has a large subscriber base. This is probably because a large feed count somehow validates the readability and worth of a blog in some way.

While this isn’t entirely bad, I would prefer that readers subscribe to Dosh Dosh without knowing the actions of their peers, i.e. they subscribe to Dosh Dosh primarily because of the content and not because it appears to be popular with other readers.

Of course, the act of subscribing to a blog depends on a collusion of various factors, some of which includes the blog’s popularity as well as the quality of its content. It might also be too difficult to actually assess the effect that public displays of Feed Counts have on influencing subscription rates.

I might be too clinical about the whole thing but I’ve decided to only display my feed count when I exceed a thousand subscribers, because I think the figure is a reasonably good indication of a blog’s content pull. I guess this is just my little sociological experiment.

Dosh Dosh’s Feed Count Meme

Here is the main question for the meme:

“Why do you display (or not display) the Feed Count for your blog?“.

I would really love to know the purpose (if any) behind putting up a feed count chicklet. Other secondary issues I want to examine include the following:

• How long did it take you to reach the current feed count? Was the growth gradual? Any notable external factors that had a positive or negative effect?




• Apart from displaying subscription buttons, what other ways (if any) do you use to encourage your readers to subscribe to your blog feed?




• In your opinion, what is the most effective way to increase your feed subscription?

Here are the six seven bloggers I will be tagging for this meme.

OK y’all, please feel free to tag other unsuspecting bloggers, if you want.

• Andy Beard – AndyBeard.eu




• Chris Garrett – Chris Garrett on New Media




• Collis – NorthXEast




• Daniel Scocco – Daily Blog Tips




• engtech – A nerd and his blog // engtech




• JohnTP – JohnTP.com




• Philip Liu – I Help You Blog

Everyone else, if you would like to tackle the same question on your blog, please email me with the link to your post and I’ll put a link to it here as well.

Hopefully, this meme will get everyone to share their thoughts on feed counts as well as ways to increase feed subscription levels.

This discussion might be interesting or beneficial for your audience and other bloggers, so please participate if you can!

Here are some posts and comments that I’ve received so far:

Andy Beard – Andy Beard.eu

For me it has been gradual growth, but the more popular your blog becomes, the more people reference what you write with links, the more direct and organic search traffic you receive, and your subscription rate tends to increase. For me it is typically 1% to 2% new subscribers per day

Chris Garrett – Chris Garrett on New Media

Your feed subscription is a reflection of your A) design B) content C) publicity D) networking E) “offerâ€? (what is in it for the reader, articulate the benefit of your blog, provide Flagship Content)…

Collis – North x East

Neither herd behavior, nor seeing large feed counts is any substitute for quality, but it can buy just a moment of time from an audience in which to provide that quality.

Daniel Scocco – Daily Blog Tips

In my opinion even if readers get initially motivated to subscribe if they see a big subscriber base on the long run they will remain subscribed only if the content is worth, so the equation remains intact.

engtech – A nerd and his blog // engtech

The FeedBurner subscriber count is also a badge of reliability. I agree with Andy Beard that displaying is a form of social proof — it shows that you have an audience and that may increase your credibility the same way as displaying your Technorati rank.

JohnTP – JohnTP.com

It was late by the time I realized that I had made a mistake by displaying my feed count so early. It would be best to display your feed count when you have atleast a few hundred subscribers, as a low feed count can discourage some readers from subscribing to your blog.

Philip Liu – I Help You Blog

Why should displaying subscriber counts even matter to discovering great blogs? Because we are constrained by a scarce resource–time. There are only 24 hours in a day. Anything that helps us to conclude quickly whether it is or is not worthy to spend that scarce resource on a particular site is welcomed.

Webduck – Pentimento:

I put a feed count on my blog because I thought it was ‘the thing to do’. Just this week though, I had been thinking of taking it off because it just didn’t reflect my readership in the right way…The way I have gotten more readers is to have a presence in many different places.

Garrett Albright – Ray Gun Robot:

So if I don’t think it [the feed count] matters that much to potential subscribers, why do I show the number at all instead of just keeping it private? Arrogance! Pride! I may only have eight other people that are currently subscribed to my feed (I myself am one of the nine), but, darn it, I’m darn proud of those eight!

Ray Dotson – Freshblogger:

I think most readers wouldn’t subscribe to a blog just because it’s popular or has a high subscriber count displayed. While popularity does tend to boost the general sense of a blog’s authority, the content and regularity of posting are the most important factors determining whether I’ll subscribe to a feed

Thilak – BlogTalk

I showed my feed count ever since I started blogging. Initially I thought that it was a way to promote our RSS feed. Infact, I learnt that it was actually hampering my feed growth. Some subscribers tend to see the readers count before subscribing; low feed count could always have a bad impact.

Ibit – Inspiration Bit

Published RSS feed numbers never influenced my subscription to their blogs. I subscribe to blogs that I find interesting and worth spending my time reading them.

Matt – Blog about Your Blog

What about visitors who don’t usually read blogs, but found yours? They typically know nothing about RSS Feeds and Feedburner. Most websites don’t use them, I didn’t even know what an RSS Feed was before I started blogging…Before you display your feed count make sure you are making the right choice. If you aren’t, it can cost you readers.

Adnan – Blogtrepreneur

I would tend to conclude that there is a tipping point with which to display your chicklet. This normally occurs at the 100 subs mark so that visitors know you have a fairly large crowd of followers.

Below this figure, I would tend to recommend that you don’t show your chicklet so that first-timers go on to read your content and make up their own minds over your stature, position in the blogging hierarchy.

Gaurav – Gauravonomics

However, if it is a blog in a saturated niche like blogging tips, personal development, marketing or technology, I do use these popularity metrics as a proxy for how influential the blog is in its niche and rarely subscribe to any blog which has less than a few hundred links or subs.