Many bloggers with Feedburner running their feeds noticed a bump in subscriber numbers over the last couple of days (my own jumped from 11,000 to 18,000 – partly as a result of two posts on Digg’s popular page).
Does this mean we’ve all suddenly been inundated with new subscribers?
I’m afraid not.
Feedburner’s blog has the answer to why this has happened. In short – they’ve started reporting how many Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage subscribers that they have. This is due to some changes in Google Reader – read more about them here – which report subscriber numbers.
From what I can gather – the Google Reader numbers reports numbers of subscribers – not numbers who actively read/click through to your blog. For that type of information you need to look at some of Feedburner’s other stats.
All in all this probably won’t mean much to the average blogger (although it’ll give us all a small ego boost for a few days) – but for those of us who are metrics addicts who love to do some analysis of who is reading our blogs and how they do it – it’ll provide some more accurate information.
Google Reader – Dominating Aggregation Market?
What interests me most about this change is that it gives us a insight into just how much of a grab Google Reader and Personalized Homepages have taken on the aggregation market.
Here at ProBlogger I’d always seen the following graph in my feedburner stats (it shows the last 30 days activity in my feeds and where people came from). As you can see Bloglines made up 30% of my readership.
Today however there’s a different story showing. With the Google figures now being reported we find that 39% of my subscribers are actually using Google Reader of Personalized Homepages and Bloglines only makes up 17%.
Google Reader has certainly taken a chunk of the market away from Bloglines (at least among ProBlogger readers) – it was only 6 months ago that the Bloglines figure was well over 60% for ProBlogger.
I’d be interested to hear other’s experience – is Google Reader dominating your feeds too?
