How to Find Out Another Blog’s Feedburner Count - Even if They Don’t Display It

CopyBlogger puts it perfectly - “Subscribers are the life blood of a successful blog”

Subscribers are visitors who care enough to actually want to be notified whenever you update your content. and “Getting someone to voluntarily pay attention to you over time is the greatest gift you can get as an online publisherâ€

Now typically, unless a publisher willingly shares that information via a feedburner chiclet (which looks like the pic below) - that information is pretty much kept secret. This post will show you how to obtain those numbers!

Why find out the number of subscribers?

If you’re a blogger:

You want to be able to benchmark your own numbers with similar sites. Furthermore, it gives a more complete picture to complement existing benchmarking metrics like

Alexa - which tracks traffic
Technorati - which tracks linkbacks
Pagerank - which tracks importance within Google.

It is especially useful if you’re new to blogging and want to know what works, (eg. writing style, topics, posting frequency etc.) - and how it translates into subscriber numbers.

If you’re an advertiser:

You want to be able to to track how many people would be reached via a press release, sponsored post, buying an advert in the feed, etc. Yes - you could just ask the publisher, but this greatly speeds up the filtering process.

So what’s the secret to getting the numbers?

Step 1: Sign up for Netvibes - a free AJAX start page

Step 2: Install the SK-Feedburner statistics widget

feedb

Then just site back and track the Feedburner Statistics of any site running feedburner!

Note: Most sites which track their feeds are already running on Feedburner - so this set of stats will be highly relevant across most sites.

Which is more valuable to you? Pagerank? Technorati rankings? Alexa rankings? Or the number of feed subscribers? Let us know in the comments!

[tags] rss, metrics [tags]

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8 Responses to 'How to Find Out Another Blog’s Feedburner Count - Even if They Don’t Display It'

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keeyit said,

on October 24th, 2007 at 9:57 am

I think 3 of them also important. Alexa,Technorati,Pagerank are needed.
Meg said,

on October 24th, 2007 at 10:53 am

Hi James,

Wow, thanks so much for this tip. I maintain a “top” list and (being technically incompetent) I have to manually grab these figures so it’ll be a real time saver for me. Just a couple of notes, this won’t work if the feed doesn’t have Awareness API activated (under publicize), and you can also easily add it to iGoogle as well.
Cool Tool for the Subscriber Voyeurs | Dipping into the Blogpond said,

on October 24th, 2007 at 11:53 am

[...] I can simply plug all the feed names into a little FeedBurner count widget and voila! the feed subscriber counts appear [...]
phyzhoe said,

on October 24th, 2007 at 8:06 pm

i think the number of feed subscribers..it show how famous your site is
syahid ali said,

on October 27th, 2007 at 12:10 pm

cool! they can run but they can’t hide. :D
sabochii said,

on November 5th, 2007 at 10:24 am

very informative n great tips! i like it
You’re faking it and we can tell, Bloated RSS Feed numbers said,

on January 10th, 2008 at 5:47 am

[...] are from these stats alone you can tell if they are faking it. Another way as reported by friedbeef is to Sign up for Netvibes and install the SK Feedburner Stats plugin which will show you [...]
How You Can Find Out the Subscriber Count of a Blog Even Even If It Isn’t Shown said,

on February 8th, 2008 at 10:37 pm

[...] If the blogger does not use Feedburner, then I’m at loss of words. I am not aware of how else you’d get the circulation information. Does anyone else know? For those who want to dig deeper, I found some interesting information over at Friedbeef’s Tech. [...]

Friedbeef’s Tech