Top 40 sites according to FeedBurner stats
franticindustries.com
FeedBurner is a popular RSS feed manager, with over 600.000 feeds in their roster. One of the advantages it offers is tracking the statistics for your RSS feed usage. Publishers can also choose to go public with this data, and many of them are displaying the number of their RSS subscribers, according to FeedBurner, on their site. (for example, on this site, it’s the little chicklet in the right side of the header; click it, and you will get an option to subscribe to the RSS feed for FranticIndustries in the feed reader of your choice)
However, FeedBurner, for some reason, isn’t trying to be a popularity measuring tool. They have the data. They have the capabilities. Yet, they’re not maintaining any sort of top list of feeds with the most subscribers. The number of RSS subscribers is not the ultimate way to measure the popularity of a website, but it’s a really important metric. If FeedBurner were to maintain such a top list, it would be at least as important as Technorati and Alexa’s top lists.
Besides waiting for FeedBurner to actually do a top list, the second best thing I could do is to create my own list of top blogs according to their FeedBurner RSS subscriber data. Maybe this experiment encourages the folks at FeedBurner to do the same thing themselves.
Bear in mind that this list is obtained in completely unscientific ways, as I simply checked out the number of RSS subscribers for blogs I know to be very popular (over 500 of them) and who have their RSS subscriber number public, and created the list from those numbers. I might have (and probably did) miss some - if you have a correction, please let me know so I can add it to the list. In any case, this list is not meant to be a definitive metric of any kind. It’s just here to tickle curiosity.
*I’ve focused on English blogs only, anything else would be far to complicated for me to do
**the numbers below are live, which means they can change over time, and the rankings might become wrong. However, it will be fun to see who went up and who went down from this point
***I chose to go with 40 sites because roughly after that number there’s a huge number of sites with similar numbers of RSS subscribers, so it gets much harder sorting them all out
So, here it is, the top 40 sites according to the number of their RSS subscriptions, as measured by FeedBurner:
1. BoingBoing
2. TechCrunch
3. 43Folders
4. Mashable
5. DumbLittleMan
6. 37signals
7. John Battelle’s Searchblog
8. CrunchGear
9. Read/Write Web
10. Coding Horror
11. How to Change the World by Guy Kawasaki
12. MicroPersuasion
13. Duct Tape Marketing
14. DiggNation
15. GoogleOperatingSystem
16. LifeHack
17. TreeHugger
18. FrenchMaidTV
19. Small Business Trends
20. Jeff Clavier’s Software Only
21. A VC
22. Search Engine Watch
23.My Personal Finance Journey
24. ProBlogger
25. Chris Pirillo
26. On The Media
27. FeedBurner
28. Vitamin
29. UberGizmo
30. Get Rich Slowly
31. Web2Explorer
32. ParentHacks
33. Particle Tree
34. Copyblogger
35. Mac Mega Site
36. Photoshop Killer Tips
37. eHub
38. French For Beginners
39. MobileCrunch
40. TheRssBlog |
