Google Reader to Report Subscriber Numbers
Tracking blog readership is a far from perfect science.
Applications like Feedburner allow you to see how many of the users who are subscribed to your feed login on a given day. But that doesn't let you know how many have read a given blog or post.
While it will remain murky, understanding your blog subscriber base is about to get a little clearer. Google has announced that beginning February 17, it will begin reporting subscriber numbers for users of Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage.
Until now, Google Reader users were missing from the charts produced by Feedburner (as shown in the example on the right). So, bloggers should expect to see an uptick in their reported readership. Market share figures on RSS readers are hard to come by, but with Google Readers's recent growth, I'd expect them to amount to 15-20% of the traffic of a technology-focused blog.
To better understand how Feedburner calculates subscribers, take a look at this post from the Feedburner blog last fall, which commemorated TechCrunch reaching the 100,000 subscriber mark.
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