After close to three years of Feedburner usage I want to say, “don’t judge the value of your blog based on Feedburner alone”. Why?
Because most people who use RSS are terrible when it comes to maintaining a good, current collection.
Ever tried a new feed-reader and just dumped your opml into it? Did you take it out again when moving on?
Ever switched blogs AND feeds and watched how many readers made the move? Well, I have. The original (aka old feed) sub number went down 10 percent but stayed that way for almost two months now.
There is the “dinosaur” function in NetNewsWire, but it looks like only few RSS-users know where to find it, as well as the unsubsribe button. I find this very puzzling, trying to keep my too high number of subscribed feeds (~350) from going much higher, that button is my friend.
I therefore argue that by now there are too many dead bloglines et al.-accounts out there so that advertising with “100k subscribers” just from Feedburner stats alone is a bit iffy. Yet another broken metric.
Technorati Tags: rss, reader, feedburner, statistics, metric