Should all RSS subscribers “count”?
I warned all of y’all that RSS has been on my mind lately, so get ready for another adventure!
On Friday, I self-congratulated about hitting 300 RSS subscribers here at the OMC (and wouldn’t you know it, we’re down to 283 as of today, oh well!), which prompted Cains over on FriendFeed to write: “I cleared out my RSS subscriptions yesterday and removed any I get from FF 
.” Somewhat offhandedly I replied: “Power to you but in my book a feed is a feed is a feed,” throwing in a winking emoticon for good digital measure.
The great point that Cains brings up is that when someone subscribes to you on FriendFeed, they are also in a sense becoming an RSS subscriber to your blog feed, if you publish a blog and include it as part of your FriendFeed offerings, of course. I do both in the case of OMC, so it brings up an interesting question: when someone subscribes to my profile on FriendFeed, should I count that subscription as part of my “official tally” of RSS subscribers?
I base my RSS numbers on what Feedburner tells me, and I’d argue that that’s as good a way as any to get an admittedly rough gauge on how many people are tracking feeds. Now, I have about 300 followers on FriendFeed these days, so I know that Feedburner isn’t counting all of these readers as part of my tally as I’ve only been playing seriously in the FF pool since the late winter and already had a few hundred RSS subscribers at that time.
So there’s the issue of how Feedburner tallies subscribers that come from FriendFeed and other RSS based content aggregation/social media platforms. Then there’s the issue of should they be counted at all?
I would argue yes, absolutely. The counterargument might be that when people subscribe to someone’s “life feed” on a service like FF, there is the possibility that they’re only going to look at your blog feed component in a passive way. While certainly possible, the same can be true of subscribing to an RSS feed in a more “traditional” manner.
Further, I get a great many links to my blog through FriendFeed, so no matter how I “count” those visitors, the bottom line is that it has proven to be a fantastic outpost for conversations and promotion.
The clincher for me, if I needed one, came while reading Tony Hung’s piece called Who Almost Has As Many RSS Readers as TechCrunch? Hung discusses TechCrunch’s “mindboggling” 900,000 subscribers, and Mashable’s relatively more modest 185,000.
Thinking about those huge numbers I realized: do you think TechCrunch et al are “turning away” subscribers in their official tallies because of where people are subscribing from? I’d think not.
