I’m at the cusp of 50k; almost there but not quite. As of yesterday, FiD has 49,004 feed subscribers. The number itself seems high, but also seems low. It’s much higher than here (hovers around 10-15), and Hot Photatoes hovers around 35. But if you think about how many people are on the web, 50k subscribers is nothing. Google gets about 50k queries in 30 seconds!
What is interesting is to put my stats in perspective. I’ve been checking up this list of some of the top blogs that use FeedBurner, of which FiD is on there. Engadget is at the top of the list with over 800k subscribers, but the counts quickly dwindle down. Funny story though, my growth has been explosive since that list was published, try and find FiD and compare its subscriber count against its former peers.
I find it odd that I have so many subscribers, 96% of which are from iGoogle. In the back of my mind, I expect to find out that it is the result of random spam iGoogle pages, but I can’t justify that because I can’t figure out why spammers would create iGoogle homepages. My second guess is that my subscribers are comprised of soccer moms and kids who don’t really know how to use the internet, but tried this iGoogle thing because their neighborhood geek suggested it to them. That is also not a good omen because it means that I can’t get a lot of blog buzz about FiD (although who knows, maybe everyone will blog about it on MySpace).
But back to my original thought, how do you quantify 50k subscribers? I tried looking at other sites who have similar numbers. Freakonomics has a little over 80k subscribers while Daily Kos has almost 70k. I am impressed that FiD has almost attained the reach of those sites!
But of course, it’s not true. I looked up FiD on Technorati and my “rank” is only #16,828 while Freakonomics is #139 and Daily Kos is #8. The problem is that while those sites generate a lot of back links to their content; they contribute to the blogosphere. The content on FiD isn’t bloggable (or maybe the audience is not blogging — see above) and so while it is a good source of information to some people, it doesn’t add value to the ecosystem (blecosystem?). Although I am getting a lot of back links from spam blogs, but again I’m not sure what the purpose of that is.
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