- Image via CrunchBase
If you think your feedburner stats were a little odd to begin with, the addition of FriendFeed stats has completely made them irrelevant to anything you might want to do with them. Case in point, is a new blog launched June 11th 2009, that was quickly tied in everywhere, that has 439 RSS readers, which is impossible when looked at from the actual number of folks who showed up to read it, or actually subscribed to it.
New blogs face an uphill battle attracting an audience, when the blog is built around delivering corporate information you want to see that the blog is taking off. But in reality, sometimes the statistics are simply impossible, good for impressing the boss, but bad for any realiability in determining audience metrics.
The Feedburner stats for the last seven days pretty much shows that feedburner (and the associated number of subscribers in FriendFeed, all 14 of them to the computer science blog at CityU of Seattle) are junk stats. Stats you might need to prove a hypothetical value of what you are doing, but not a real true value. Remember this site launched 11 June, the Feedburner stats started 16 June, and it already gets a pile of hits.
To offset this number, the ice rocket tracker stats for the blog are below.
The huge disconnect is somewhat disturbing in relationship to reality, all new blogs start off rocky while the audience is still being figured out, who you are writing to, who you are writing for, and the tone of the blog/web site that you are involved with. Artificially inflating numbers is generally a bad thing, and the sad part is that there is no real way to fix this. The numbers are going to remain false, they cannot be explained or justified, but they could be used to give a false sense that the blog/website is doing better than it actually is. That is the real tragedy when dealing with web site subscription numbers, you can get bad data from good systems, and it is when you are making good decisions off bad data that everything has a tendency to fall apart.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Ginormous RSS Subscription Numbers? Thank FriendFeed (mashable.com)
- FeedBurner Adds FriendFeed To RSS Count (johnchow.com)
- Subscriber Counts Now Mean Nothing (regulargeek.com)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=83c4216f-0da8-4116-8ce3-29b2534b837a)
I know exactly how you feel Dan. I felt much the same when I wrote about the change (http://www.shootingatbubbles.com/index.php/2009/06/18/wtf-friendfeed-you-may-have-just-crossed-the-line/) … and I’m still not happy with this kind of thing being done – even after an email exchange with one of the Friendfeed team that came as a result of the post.
Bloggers are having a hard enough time formulating a reliable enough set of stats without having to deal with this number counting by misdirection.
Steve – what blows me away is that the actual subscriber stats for the new blog is 1, me, the actual number of visitors is about 10 a day, not all me, the number of FriendFeed subscribers about 13, one of them is me. Realistically for a blog that is 2 weeks old to be showing some 438 is pretty amazing. Good if I want to fake out the boss, bad if I want to know the actual number of subscribers without having to read the actual logs off the server.