As someone who lives in Google Reader (GR) and who’s view of the web always starts out in GR do I need to know how many people are subscribed to my RSS feed? If I do, does that make me “virtually” vain?

Over the last few hours I’ve been challenged to run my RSS feeds via Feedburner and my response continues to be: Why? What added benefit does it give me? What do I gain from it? What does it give my subscribers? As of now I still haven’t had a de-facto answer that in any way persuades me to make the jump. As always, I’m open to change, I’m willing to give things a try, but I must understand why? I’m not willing to change just for the sake of it - besides anything else, making the move without commitment simply undermines any perceived value this blog might have as well as probably confusing any readership I have acquired

I guess there are two inter-connected perceptions at play here. Firstly, all my RSS feeds come from URL’s I own and control and are sat within the blog site URL. This gives me the sense of my infrastructure being complete and cohesive. (This is not a sense of completeness in a “need to hug my blog” kind of way, but more in a professional, consistent and controllable way.) Secondly, it really makes no difference for me to know if 10, 20 or 4000 people are informed of new entries on the blog, although I’ll admit to a certain amount of idle curiosity - but I’m sure that’s pure vanity. Knowing no-one reads this blog would not deter me from writing it, but neither would it provide cause for me to stop. What does matter is “who” is actually “reading” it.

It’s that age-old conundrum: quality versus quantity. I’ve done the quantity type blog - and closed that about 18 months ago after 3.5 years of writing - this blog is about quality. “Tipping point” science states done well quality will ultimately deliver quantity and it’s this science that makes markonthenet.com a bit experimental. I’m using SEO, personal/professional contacts and experience to try and get the right people to read this blog, so you could say it does have a bit of an agenda built into it, but it isn’t an agenda built around volume.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to know how many people are subscribing to your feed, but that gives you no indication of who is reading your content. There is a feel-good factor as the total number of subscribers gradually rises, but the reality is I have more confidence in my web server log files to tell me who is reading my content and what else they might have found to be of interest, which in turn will lead me to develop this blog in the right direction.

To put this in perspective, let me be a little more analytical of my own GR habits. I have over 500 feeds I now follow through GR. Of those, only 20 or so are guaranteed to have my eyes view every article they publish. I only commit (to myself) to view the others if something specific arises and/or I have to time to kill (which is rare). If each of the publishers to whom I subscribe used Feedburner to deliver their feeds all 500 would see a registration of me being updated on their feed - though they have no idea who I am, where I am from, what my interests are or what brought me to them in the first place. Are they each to know they’ve only got a less than (all things being equal) 4% chance I’ll read their posts? And that list of 500 continues to grow on a regular basis.

In talking this “Feedburner” proposition through on paper I am coming to the conclusion that for a piece of work which I am aiming to be built around quality Feedburner is not the means by which to measure its success. Feedburner is too high-level and whilst the numbers of subscribers is a true reflection, it doesn’t really give me a feel for what subscribers are reading. To this end Feedburner delivers the vanity tools, but my aim is to accrue an audience more focussed on four vertical sectors as opposed to a wide horizontal sweep of one or two sectors.

So to answer the questions I originally posed when asked to consider Feedburner I have to say I believe my decision to stay where I am is wholly right for this particular blog. Feedburner won’t actually offer me any benefits - it may even lead me in the wrong direction of developing this blog. As far as I can tell it also won’t help the readership I have acquired. For the time being I’ll be sticking with RSS feeds being hosted here on the blog URL.

If you agree or disagree I’d be really pleased to hear what you have to say in the comments.