Displaying your RSS Feed Count: What is the Big Deal?
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Recently I’ve read a few articles on Displaying your Feedburner Subscriber Count. DoshDosh and I Help You Blog (two blogs I feed read daily) recently participated in a meme about it. The gist of their articles discuss why you should or shouldn’t display your feedcount. And if you do decide to display that count, make sure you have a nice amount of subscribers.
I never really saw the problem. I think thought displaying 40 or 50 readers was good. I mean think about it, on top of the average 200 unique visitors we get per day, that’s about an extra 40 people just reading our content, per day.
Good right? Wrong.
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.
So to those readers what does it mean? What does the feedburner widget displaying “40 Readers” mean to them?
One of our readers saw it as how many visitors we’ve received:
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By thinking we only had 46 readers, that already discredits our content. After reading that review, I immediately removed our feedcount widget, and made it easier for people to subscribe to our feed. I’m sure Andrew wasn’t the first person to be turned away from our feedburner count, but he will be the last.
Before you display your feed count make sure you are making the right choice. If you aren’t, it can cost you readers.
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6 Comments on this post
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Ryan said:
I’m pretty proud of my two, sometimes one reader that suscribes to me. I was going to remove my count widgets, but hey….
I wouldn’t want to insult that person that actually subscribed.
It’s a way to make my one or two readers feel special.
I’ll keep telling myself that anyways.
For what it’s worth, I suscribe to BAYB
March 30th, 2007 at 9:39 am -
Matt said:
great 🙂 let me subscribe to you, that will make 3 🙂
March 30th, 2007 at 11:17 am -
karl said:
another rss feed count concept, feedmashr.com
March 30th, 2007 at 8:56 pm -
Philip Liu said:
Whether to display subscriber counts is a very personal choice at the end. Those articles are just things to keep in mind. 🙂
March 30th, 2007 at 10:48 pm -
Matthew Jabs said:
This is interesting. You wrote this post back in March, but now in May you have your subscriber count displayed? Is that because you now have more people subscribed? I’d be very interested to hear why you have this displayed now after reading this post.
I do see the validity in your post & appreciate the point-of-view, I had never thought of it that way.
May 14th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
[…] 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 If you’ve enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my blog feed for free updates.Bookmark this post:These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]