Find out How Many Subscribers a blog has Even When Its FeedCount Is Hidden
August 6, 2007 by Gaman
When you visit a blog, chances are it’s probably using FeedBurner counter to keep track of its RSS feed subscriber counts. Most bloggers display the FeedBurner FeedCount chicklet quite happily; others choose to hide it for several reasons.
I hide mine, at least temporarily, to see whether this could speed up the subscribing process.
The argument is that visitors are more likely to subscribe to a feed if they see a higher count because it tells them that you are an authoritative voice in your niche. From the poll I conducted recently, that seems to be the case where most of my readers say they are more likely to subscribe to a blog if it has a higher subscribe counts.
For blogs with a hidden FeedBurner chicklet, it’s still possible to view number of subscribers provided that the blog owner has the FeedCount activated in his FeedBurner account. It is inactive by default in any feed you create on our system.
In general all feeds on FeedBurner start with the address feeds.feedburner.com/feedname
To view the FeedCount for a blog, just add ~fc/ so that the new URL becomes
feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/feedname
Therefore, Sabahan.com feed count would be feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/sabahancom.
If the FeedCount is not enabled, you’ll get a message saying FeedCount is not enabled for that feed.
Other FeedCount example:
ProBlogger.Net
TechCrunch
If you want to prevent access to these numbers, just make sure FeedCount is inactive.
To do so, sign in to your account, click your feed’s title on My Feeds, and under the Publicize tab, you’ll see whether the FeedCount is on/off indicated by a checkmark next to its listing. Visit the FeedCount link to modify your FeedCount status and appearance.
gaman,
i actually removed my feedburner count stat to see if this myths is true. lols so far i there is some increment..but not very much lols..but i will post if this is a dream come true lols
Has there been an example where a blogger has very minimal feed but still making good PR and money?
To get a good PR not depend on the feed count or not I think. There are other factors that calculated the PR. Other reason feed count being displayed is just to attract and motivate new readers to subscribe the blog.
Gaman correct me if wrong.
If you meant Google PageRank, no the subscriber counts have nothing to do with it. As for the money part, if you have tons of traffic coming from the search engines for example, you can make good money from AdSense even though you only have a handful of subscribers.
Yep, i raise my hand for this statement. correct correct correct. Adsense been feeding me quite good this year even on lower subscribers.
niche niche niche.
That’s a really handy thing to know if you want to find out someone’s subscriber count! Looks like I’ll be doing some research to find out some other sites subscriber counts!
I dont think you need to have a lot of subscribers to make money, but it cant hurt!
Like what Gaman said, the feedcount is a way of showing the world that they have an authoritative for having such a number in their feed… It is the only first impression of a person who might only come to see your site once and go off, forgetting about coming back again.
It is usually advisable to keep the feedcount invisible while the number is still small… Especially when you see the number keeps on jumping up and down on every single day… I think the number only represents how many people have been viewing your feed (and thus downloading that feed) on every single day… So if the feed reader who is subscribed to you is not reading today, it will just be counted as not-subscribed even though he is still a subscriber.
Feeds have no other means of finding out how many people are actually holding that actual feed… But they can only count the number of unique readers for that day only…
Sometimes the feedcount can be a selling point for attracting more people to subscribe to it since this fellow seems to have some authoritative!
Charles – I could not agree with your points here anymore!
Oh? which part is it?