February 16, 2007
Google Now Reporting Subscribers
Starting with our Saturday February 17th subscriber reporting, FeedBurner publishers will be able to see how many Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage subscribers they have. (Thanks, Google!) This information will show up in tonight's subscriber reports (meaning that most of you will start to see the data on Saturday morning, U.S. Central Time).
What does this mean? This is one more data point to help you understand how many people have asked to receive your feed (aka "subscribers"). For those who are interested in the particulars, the number that Google is reporting is the total number of Google users who've subscribed to your feed in Reader or with Personalized Homepage.
While the subscriber number reflects overall interest in your content, keep in mind that there are plenty of other metrics within FeedBurner that help you more fully understand distribution and consumption. Now would be a good time to remind you that you can track clickthroughs for each item in your feed, and each item will show a breakdown on an aggregator-by-aggregator basis to help you understand which clients drive the most traffic to your site. Our TotalStats service measures Item Views (actual reads of your feed items) and Reach (number of unique people who viewed or clicked on your content). And our free StandardStats website metrics will provide you with numerous additional details on your inbound traffic from aggregators.
Want to build your subscriber numbers with Google's services? Make subscribing easier for your visitors. Look for the Google subscription button as an option in both our BrowserFriendly and ChickletChooser services for FeedBurner feeds in your account. Both give you the ability to offer Google as a subscription option in your feed and on your website with just a few clicks.
Comments
Will Google subscribers show up in feed circulation tomorrow, or will it take a day or two?
Daniel -
They'll show up in the morning.
Do you have a complete, total list of those who currently output this information by chance?
Hey Dustin,
We currently don't have a list of services that report back. You can nose through your stats on the "subscriber" page and get a sense of what's going on.
Make sense? :)
Hooray! I read that on the Google Reader blog this morning and am glad that everything will show up tomorrow. Playing with numbers is fun!
awesomeness!
太好了，期盼已久！
I've often wondered if google reader is making an impact on the other online readers such as Bloglines. Anyone know?
A huge thank you to both Google and FeedBurner on this one. With Firefox 2.0 and the integration of the new (and far better) Google Reader with it, I've been using it for months but have always been frustrated by the fact the numbers were not being reported. I'll be curious to see what the undercount has been.
How long until they're implemented in FeedBurner's stats?
that's cool
errr when is US Central Time? The rest of the world i.e. over 6 billion people all use GMT!
Everton:
3 hours, 10 minutes from now. (GMT -0600)
--Rick
Cool! That's what I wanted.
Wondering how many billions of reader I've got in Google Reader... :P
Holy smokes....
Our numbers just jumped by alomst one third - turns out we have more then 500 google subscribers... :)
Great that Google opened up. Are there any more significant services out there that dont report - in other words, is there more that we dont know about?
thanks for getting this sorted, guys!
I guess I'm missing something.
Why is it required for any service to "report" it's subscribers to get counted correctly? Doesn't FeedBurner simple watch the number of users "hitting" the feed URL (and figuring out some way to count unique subscribers)?
What am I missing?
Dharmesh - For desktop aggregators, that's exactly how we work. For web-based readers, they poll the feed once on behalf of all of their users. Consequently, there are far more users than there are hits - and it's incumbent upon the web-based service to tell us how many users are on the other side of that hit. We wrote this up in more detail last month - that should give you some more insight into how we work with web-based readers.
This is great news. I and a lot of my friends have been waiting for this to happen. Now waiting for Sunday morning. Congratulations.
And what about Bloglines? Do they fetch every feed for every single user or provide some kind of information about the subscribers?
Andrea - Bloglines reports their subscriber numbers; more info is in last month's report on web-based aggregators.
OMG - this was the MOST awesome thing to wake up to this morning. My subscriber count jumped by 30%!
With Alexa now also reporting rank by country, my ego is about to burst this weekend...
You guys REALLY rock.
:)
@Rick: Thanks! Thought it was too much expensive even for Feedburner to fetch such information from aggregators..
Yes, I must repeat: «You guys REALLY rock.»
No wonder my subscriber stats just doubled :)
Nice work Google and Feedburner for catching on it so fast.
Wow! I'm thinking there must be a bug with this, because we jumped from maybe 1200 readers to just over 90,000! Given the content of my site I would expect it to go up a good bit, but that is absolutely insane.
For now, I'll assume it's a bug but hope that it's not. :)
I was averaging 180 subscribers, and in one day it jumped to 300. Very cool
Mickey - you publish a popular blog about a Google product, and you're surprised that you have a lot of Google readers? ;)
No bug, that number's real. Congrats on building a great following...
Woah. My subscriber numbers went from 25,000 to 195,000. I had no idea that many people were subscribing to the feed through Google. Typically from my server stats I see 4-7,000 people a day coming in from Personalized Google and another 1000 from the reader. The 195K number seems a bit on the high side given the number of those that actually click-through. If the bump up in numbers is only due to the Google feeds, that would mean 170K from Google, with a click-through rate of 2-4 percent.
This is great news. About a 1k increase for me. =)
Google readers just pip bloglines as the single most popular feed reader. Makes me think Google were waiting for just the right moment.
Wow! Some of the numbers these folks are reporting are really impressive. Thanks Google, we really appreciate it.
Great news! Can you give an update on RSS Market Share?
http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/2005/01/rss_market_shar.php
Now I understand the reason why my subscribers increased a lot in these days :)
Great news!
Arnoud - stay tuned!
OK, that makes more sense. I was trying to figure out why my feed counts jumped over 30% in a single day. :-)
This is something really amazing. Alot of bloggers reporting hike in their subscribers numbers.
I recently started using Google reader and find it very useful. This integration is great!
