FeedBurner Relevancy And RSS Subscriber Numbers

Jean-Baptiste Jung has a good blog post over at The Blog Herald that questions whether FeedBurner is still relevant. In the post, Jean examines how in the past month, his numbers if varied widely. As a long time user of FeedBurner, I too have seen numbers vary wildly with no explanation. By the way, it’s awesome that WPTavern.com has bumped up past the 2,000 FeedReader average.

Line Graph Swinging Up And Down

I’ve enjoyed being able to know roughly how many people are subscribed to the Tavern RSS feed but in reality, I don’t know how accurate those numbers are. While Jean lists out some other services that could replace FeedBurner such as FeedBlitz, I think we have to take a step back and ask ourselves, does the number of RSS subscribers matter anymore? Are they still used as part of the popularity of a particular website? Will you lose out on advertising sales because of little or no numbers? Without using a service like FeedBurner, you’ll have no way of knowing the reach your sites RSS feed has.

Personally, I prefer to know how many people are subscribed to the RSS feed even if it’s just a rough number. It’s one more metric I have at my disposal on monitoring the growth and reach of the site. How do you feel about the notion of RSS Subscriber numbers?