Last week’s post regarding FeedBurner brought up some good points about displaying feed stats. As a test, I put up my feed counter to see if there would be any growth in my feed subsciptions. (I have seen a steady rise in subscribers, but I was already receiving steady growth so it’s hard to tell if displaying the stats made an impact.) All that to say Daily Blog Tips just wrote an article on feed stats. Let me ask you a question: What do you think of FTSA or any other site dislpaying the Feed Stat Icon?
20 Comments »
Dem's fightin' words...
Scott said:
I removed mine for a few reasons (most of which you know about…mainly technical), but a couple I did not mention were: 1) the issue brought up in the article regarding social pressure and 2) the tooting my own horn feeling I got.
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 2:44 pm
Maki said:
Shawn,
I really like your site design and the cool feed button.
The feed count chicklet fits nicely with the rest of your design and I think you should leave it up if it seems to be bringing you some success
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 2:54 pm
ben said:
I like the sites that display them. But I am biased because I display one on my site. I have noticed a steady amount of readers since I put it up.
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Dennis said:
I could really go either way. I like it because it is convenient for me
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Ronalfy said:
I display it simply to let others know that people are actually reading. It’s a little helpful when a site isn’t heavily commented.
Displaying your feed stats can be a curse though. Sometimes it shows how many people “aren’t” reading your blog.
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 4:00 pm
Anna said:
I like it because I like to know what size community I’m in that reads this particular blog. It kinda makes it fun.
Is it bad, though, that I think it would be funny if everyone unsubscribed at one time for one day just to freak you out?
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 4:02 pm
{Shawn} said:
@ Scott: If you’re setting it up because you know you really are just tooting your own horn then yeah, take it down. If you felt like that’s what other people thought of you then I would say go for it. But you’re on mint now so until mint comes out with a feedstat counter thingymajig your out of luck anyways.
@ Maki: Thanks for the accolades, dude. I’m glad my feed counter meets your approval.
Feel free to stop in as often as you like.
@ Ron: That’s a great point. There are a lot of blogs have a strong readership but not a lot of participation in the comments.
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Phil said:
I quite like seeing how many people read a blog, but it doesn’t impact whether I will subscribe to something. I’d quite like to be able to display the number of subscribers I have, but I don’t know how to do it now I’m using Mint to track my feed.
One thing I will note is that many people’s feedburner counts aren’t showing up for me. Yours is just a blue rectangle that says feedburner underneath it, as are many other peoples.
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Do you display your feed count? said:
[...] Chris Garrett and Andy Beard and Shawn Blanc answered the same question. Like this article? Subscribe to the RSS [...]
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 6:52 pm
{Shawn} said:
@ Phil: What browser are you on? (Oh, and in case you were wondering, I have 143 subscribers today).
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Phil said:
I’m on Safari. Is yours an animated chicklet? I notice the static one on paul stamatiou’s blog is working.
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 8:27 pm
{Shawn} said:
@ Phil: I put up a static one (and added a new page while I was at it).
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Scott said:
The horn tooting was not the greatest analogy, so to elaborate I basically found myself going back and forth between desiring to display the count to show my growing readership, but then feeling guilty for drawing too much attention to it. Early on I also wanted to hide it, because it was not that large compared to what I was seeing on other blogs. Besides that, whenever it dropped it had me wondering if I had written something to irritate people, or if it was totally just random. I think that web stats can be helpful tools, but they can also distract you from what grew your feed count in the first place. I still like having my count in Mint where people can see it if they want, but I probably won’t use a thingamajig if one is ever developed.
Posted on March 15, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Idhrendur said:
I tend to not notice such details. I fixate on the posts. And I don’t use such technologies on my own. In fact, I take a lazy man’s approach to web-based stuff (as you’ve surely noticed if you’ve ever clicked on my screen name and seen my ugly blog). But, hey, I make up for it with application programming skills.
Posted on March 16, 2007 at 12:39 am
Ralph Dagza said:
I used to display my feed count when i was using feedburner but im using bird feeder from mint
Posted on March 16, 2007 at 12:56 am
{Shawn} said:
The Mint feeder is definately growing in popularity. Honestly I don’t know why.
Posted on March 16, 2007 at 1:11 am
Phil said:
@Shawn, I see it now all is well again! In response to the growing popularity of BirdFeeder I think it’s due to the integration of stats. People like to have them all in one place. But one thing I do like about it is that it appears more accurate. For me, I have an average readership 4 times bigger than the largest stat Feedburner had. There might be reasons for it, and there probably are, but thats valuable information that I wasn’t aware of.
Posted on March 16, 2007 at 3:37 am
Edwin said:
I display my feed count if its over 50.
Posted on March 17, 2007 at 5:34 am
David Bradley said:
If you have a Feedburner feed, it’s a very simple matter for anyone with the inclination to find out how many subscribers you have even if you aren’t displaying the count on your site.
I’ve just blogged about the issue on Sciencetext
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