Official Google Reader Blog: Subscriber Stats, Summed Up

I came accross this post today - Official Google Reader Blog: Subscriber Stats, Summed Up. The post is from October 15th, so it is a bit old but still has a good point to be made.

They talk about the new way that Google will be caculating the amount of people that are subscribed to a feed. This is a good way to know how many people are reading your feed. These are people that do not on a regular bases come to the site but read it through a rss reader of some kind (web based or a desktop piece of software)

They make a great point at the end of the post:

What this all means if you’re a feed publisher is that if you’re interested in getting the most comprehensive overview of your subscribers, you should be using a service like FeedBurner or Google Webmaster Tools. On the other hand, if you’re a Reader user, we hope you take advantage of the numbers that we now show next to search results, so that you can pick the most appropriate feed to subscribe to.

If you are not usung FeedBurner you should. I have added it to this blog and did not have to change a thing in the setings. More so, there is a plug in you can get from FeedBurrner that will take care of most of the heavy lifting form Wordpress for you.

I had subscribed to my own feed before I added the plug in ( so should you; this way you can see what your readers are seeing and fix any problems that may come up). After adding the plugin and following the instructions on the page I was woried that I would lose the feed. Not a chance. It just kept on working and all was good. Now I can go to FeedBurner and look at my stats of who is reading the feeds and what type of application they use to read it. All great information

Are you using Feedburner? If you do not then why? Do you know of a different service that you like? Drop me a comment and let me know.