10 Industry Blogs, 14 Days - Feedburner Stats
Glen Allsopp / 
16 Comments / 
January 11th, 2008 / 
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Although I may seem like a stats junkie, your assumptions would be correct and this post is no different in terms of data, uniqueness and interesting information (at least I think so). Basically I took 10 blogs in our ‘industry’ that display their feedburner stats and monitored them over a 14 day period to see how feedburner stats fluctuated and if there were any patterns to spot.
If not, then at least theres another blog post made and something tested rather than just guessing. Here’s feedburners info on how the figures they record are gathered:
When we report a subscriber number, that represents the total number of individuals who had the feed requested on their behalf on that day.
So basically what that means is that if 100 people read your blog via a feed reader, and 50 via a web based reader, but only 25 of those web based readers open their browser in a day, the next day your feedburner subscriber stats would show 125 readers.
The feedburner subscriber stats were checked daily from the 26th December to 8th January for ViperChill, David Airey, Blogstorm, SEOmoz, NowSourcing, AndyBeard, Shoemoney, John Chow, TopRank and Marketing Pilgrim.
Total Subscribers for all Blogs
- Minimum: 70,445 - Wed, December 26th
- Average: 72,946
- Maximum: 76,167 - Tue, January 8th
Not surprisingly the lowest figures are showing on the 26th of December which is taking stats from Chrismas day, no doubt the drop is from the lower number of people opening up their browsers. Also the last day of tracking (subscribers tend to increase) shows the largest number of total subscribers, on average that is 7,600 per blog.
No. Sites where Stats Decreased, per day
- Minimum: Stats never decreased on Thursday, Thursday & Tuesday for any blog
- Maximum: Stats decreased on Sunday for all 10 blogs
With this in mind, if you want to see your feedburner stats at their highest, it’s probably best to check it on a Thursday, and to see them at their lowest, check them on a Sunday.
Percentage Increase over the 2 Weeks
- Minimum: 5% by TopRank & Shoemoney
- Average: 12%
- Maximum: 28% by David Airey
David has been receiving a lot of attention the last 2 weeks with his stats jumping from 2,564 subscribers to 3,275. Nowsourcing jumped 22%, the blog with the lowest reader count (although one of my favourites) from 180 to 220.
Subscriber fluctuations per Blog
It looks like there’s a close ‘battle’ between Andy & David, although I’m sure it’s just a bit of friendly competition. SEOmoz keeps creeping over and under the 20,000 readers line but I’m sure that will continue to rise. Overall, all blogs monitored have increased their reader stats over the last 14 days.
What You Can Learn from this
- Tuesday & Thursday tends to be a good time to see your peak subscriber statistics
- Fluctuations happen for all blogs and not just yours so it’s not something to worry about
- The industry that we are in is very healthy, and shows theres a large amount of quality information being pumped out by these news sources
- New sites are coming out all the time and gaining big readership, Blogstorm is a great example
Keep working hard, producing quality content, and hopefully your stats will begin to increase as well.
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I’ve seen a bigger increase in subscribers this month than for all of December already. Interesting post.
Thanks for putting me amongst such well-known company, Glen.
I think it’s fair to say that if I hadn’t have blogged about my domain name being stolen, then returned, I’d not have received all the recent attention.
Thursday was certainly my highest RSS count for this week, pushing me up to a record 3,450. I don’t know where they all come from!
You might have missed out a little on some of the ramifications of David’s domain name problem, but some of his subscribers would have been for davidairey.com/feed/ and when that was no longer pointing to Feedburner during his problems, he lost a chunk of readers.
December 26th being a holiday in many places is effectively a Sunday, thus you started at a very low point. My numbers would have been affected by not posting for most of the period.
You also need to take into account cross-over from sharing etc that seems to get counted as subscribers for a short period. You would notice this most if you are linked to by someone like Rober Scoble or he shares one of your items.
Very interesting Glen, thank you. I’m still buzzing that our little blog has over 10k subscribers! Graywolf has a nice post about blog stats and goal tracking today that people should check out as a compliment to this post.
Nicely done analysis as usual, Glen! Since I’m one of your favorites, perhaps I should blog more.
And Lee, since Glen has labeled NowSourcing as an “industry blog,” does this mean it makes the Biglist? Show the love, man.
I have been following Blogstorm since their launch day, and I must say that Patrick is a real internet marketer and also a very approachable guy
Nice post, Glen!
Hi Glen, very cool article. Unique and useful.
Thanks for sharing these stats. It provide a lot of assurance that my blog’s growth is healthy.
Fascinating. Thanks for the useful info.
Nice post Glen. This will help all those people that check their blog stats every 5 minutes to gain some insight into what they are obsessing over.
good stats and very useful info.