When you’re trying to track statistics online, it often feels like you need Wikipedia Brown – child detective Encyclopedia Brown’s online-savvy incarnation. For example… The Case of Website Grader and the 1,356 Subscribers.
My children’s writing blog GottaBook is a Blogger powered blog. I recently ran it through Website Grader for fun. I got some good information from it, so no complaints, but one factoid was particularly interesting to me: Bloglines reported about 1,356 subscribers to my feed in their system, probably a “small fraction” of the total number of subscribers to the feed.
First off, I truly had no idea of my a subscriber baseline. I know my Feedburner stats but was blogging for a few years before I set that up. The Bloglines number seemed like it could be right on… though as my “small fraction” I chose 1/64th!
I thought little about this again until, in an email thread on another issue entirely, someone else mentioned that Website Grader said their blog had “around 1,356 Bloglines subscribers.” Really?
So I ran a few other blogs through Website Grader – and the other Blogger blogs I chose also had “about 1,356 subscribers.” Very popular LiveJournal blogs I graded had much lower numbers. This is when I called in Wikipedia Brown.
I do not yet have a solution to this mystery. Still, this does show one more time how tracking statistics online remains part art and part science… and it’s really no use getting too hung up on them. Besides, numbers by themselves – whether counting traffic, subscribers, followers or other such metrics – really aren’t that important. If you’re getting the results you want, it doesn’t matter if you have one subscriber… or 1,356.
What do you think? Do numbers by themselves matter more than I think they do? Or do you know the solution to the Case of the 1,356 Subscribers? I’d love to hear from you….
blob with magnifying glass by Mark du Toit
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
I find it fascinating that we’ve moved from “look at this great technology – what can we do with it”? To “I wish THIS technology existed.” For instance, don’t you think there should be a program out there that could aggregate your stats. For instance, I have subscribers on facebook, jacketflap, twitter, rss, email, livejournal, blogger, myspace, newsletter, bloglines, google readers, etc. I know there are overlaps, so even adding them up by hand doesn’t give a clear picture. Seems like there should be some way to collate this info.
!!
e
I agree, Elizabeth. It is flummoxing and can be frustrating when people ask “so, how many people read your site?”
The problem comes from the fact that anyone can read a feed in a different way. And that’s a good thing, of course… just not for us counting! At the end of the day, of course, it doesn’t really matter… but it would be nice to have that clear picture nonetheless.
Agreed, Elizabeth. It would be great to get that kind of information — and to be able to see a combined list of the comments people leave in the various locations. Hopefully one of these days …
jon