How many Google Reader users subscribe to our feed (or yours)?

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google

How many Google Reader users subscribe to our feed (or yours)?

by Brad Linder Oct 15th 2007

There's a neat little trick that lets you see how many people are subscribing to a site's RSS feed in Google Reader.

All you have to do is fire up Google Reader, click the "Add Subscription" button and type a web site name or keyword. Google Reader will spit out a list of blogs and news sites along with the number of users who have subscribed to that site using Google Reader.

These numbers are only kind of useful. After all, Google Reader is just one of hundreds of RSS readers. And only a small percentage of web users actually subscribe to RSS feeds. But Google Reader is probably one of the more popular readers out there, and this data provides yet another way for people to argue about which web sites are more popular than others.

For the record, Download Squad has over 9,000 subscribers according to Google Reader. This represents a fraction (although not an insignificant one) of the overall number of people who subscribe to our RSS feed. But then, since we're a technology-oriented blog, a higher percentage of our audience knows about and uses RSS feeds than audiences for many other sites.

Tags: google-reader, rss, subscribers, traffic, trends

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

~Karolis said 4:28PM on 10-15-2007

Well, I have tried this and it finds several different feeds [different posts] for my blog, and then shows number of subscribers separately. Which added up still does not equal to what FeedBurner is telling me.

MrKniceGuy said 5:06PM on 10-15-2007

I use the RSS feed, although not from google. I use http://www.netvibes.com/

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