Just because people subscribe to a feed, doesn’t mean they read it. So I’ve been conducting an experiment of sorts. Not particularly scientific and absolutely no baseline measure, so consider it more anecdotal than anything else.
As regular readers know, about a month ago, I moved Marketing Roadmaps to the WordPress platform from TypePad but I did not redirect my Feedburner feed. This was a deliberate choice, as I am convinced that feeds — especially feeds that have been active for four years as the original Roadmaps one was — accumulate waste circulation. This is people who have subscribed to the blog in multiple feed readers, probably serially, as they bounce from reader to reader. I wanted to stop carrying these dupes.
I’ll use myself as an example. When I started reading blogs, I used the Bloglines feedreader. When Google introduced its feedreader, I switched over to it, and then about a year or so ago, I switched to Newsgator. When I switched however I did not unsubscribe the abandoned readers from the feeds. So there are a significant number of feeds to which I am subscribed at least twice, possibly three times.
While I generally refrain from assuming that my behavior is reflective of the rest of the population, in this case, I think my pattern is pretty typical for the small 11% of the online population that uses feedreaders (Forrester data.)
How much waste is there in my old feed? A month into the cut-over, subscribers to the new Marketing Roadmaps feed are about 6% of the total number of subscribers to the old feed. Since this is totally unscientific research, we can’t make the correlation that only 6% have re-subscribed, but I will bet that it isn’t far from the truth.
What does that tell us? I make no claim that my results are indicative of anything other than my blog and its audience. However, my data hints that feedreader subscriber numbers are very inflated, especially for long running blogs, and may not be the best basis for evaluating a blog’s readership or creating ranking systems. If used at all, feed reader subscribers should not be weighted heavily.
Further substantiation. The number of visitors and unique visitors per month to the old TypePad site in August and September, the last two full months of its life as the active blog, and to the new site in its first full month are about the same. Traffic to the TypePad site is also falling off. While this is all extremely unscientific and has absolutely no statistical validity, it does support my belief that the readers who read my blog on the blog is a fairly stable number, and most have followed over to read at the new site.
How useful is my data? What can other people extrapolate? A lot or a little I suppose, depending on how honest you want to be about how many readers are actually, regularly reading your blogs. It’s up to you.
For myself, I have a great deal of confidence that I truly know how many regular readers Marketing Roadmaps has. Thanks for sticking with me. You know who you are 🙂
Wow, thanks for sharing your findings. Although I would think/hope that simple procrastination has a lot to do with the small migration rate.
Thanks for the comment Michael. I’m not fussed about the low rate of resubscribe at all.
I have a loyal core of readers for whom I am very grateful. If I pick up a few more as the months go on and folks get around to it, that’s great. Other readers may have simply stopped reading the blog altogether. Some of my loyal readers may have been subscribed in multiple readers, as I was.
And that’s the point: Feedreader numbers are inflated for any number of reasons. Don’t accept them at face value.
i must be the anomaly bc i make sure im not double subscribed to anything. guess i’m just anal 😉
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I’m one of those who cleans out my subscriptions – if only because all those unread posts contribute to my anxiety level.
That said, you make an excellent point about variability among methods of gauging a blogger’s reach.
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