Google Now Reporting Subscribers : Feed Count Doubled

Recently Yahoo started reporting feed subscribers, and now the good news is that Google has also joined in by allowing reports of number of feed subscribers in Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepages.

Google introduces the feature and says that in future may include other Google products that support feeds.

“If you have access to your server logs, you can see the count directly in the HTTP header of our requests (read more in our FAQ). For an easier solution, you can use a web analytics service such as FeedBurner to get a detailed breakdown of your subscribers from a variety of feed readers.”

FeedBurner publishers can now track how many Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage subscribers they have. This is great news as now you can have a better idea of what your actual feed counts are. You will see a increase in feed counts depending on how many Google subscribers you have.

Google Feedfetcher grabs RSS or Atom feeds when users subscribe to them in Google Reader or the Google Personalized Homepage. It collects and periodically refreshes these feeds, but does not index them in Blog Search or Google’s other search services.

I expected an increase, but to my surprise our feed count has doubled. Our feedburner count was hovering over 4000 subscribers till a few days back, and today it is showing over 8000 subscribers.

I analyzed my feed readers and it seems around 50% of our readers use Google Reader! Previously Bloglines constituted most of our readers by a wide margin.

Well I switched to Google Reader and I have been recommending it as the best online RSS aggregator available (as have other top bloggers). I talked about some power tips for Google Reader which readers may find useful.

Previous reports that Bloglines is most popular web news reader may change and Google Reader may come out top now that they have enabled this metric. Now you will see more “subscribe with Google” buttons replacing the “Subscribe with Bloglines” buttons soon.