Reader collates stats about your blog in an easy-to-consume format.
Google didn’t own FeedBurner when I started Domain Name Wire, and I also didn’t want to trust my RSS feed to a third party. That means I syndicate using plain old RSS.
Fortunately, some major RSS readers including Google Reader now show you how many subscribers your blog has.
Bloggers can see their full stats on the Google Webmaster console, but anyone can view the total number of subscribers (using Google Reader) for a blog they subscribe to.
For example, here’s what Reader publicly shows:
That’s for my main feed; the webmaster console shows additional feed (such as atom) subscription numbers.
While the subscriber count itself is neat, I also like how you get a quick snapshot of your blogging activity. The blue columns represent the number of posts I for each hour of the day. You’ll notice most of my posts come in the 10 am hour, followed by the 12 pm hour CDT.
You can also view this chart by day of week and over the past 30 days.
This is interesting for bloggers, but what might be more interesting is looking at similar data of popular blogs. You might get some good data about “what works”.
Kevin Murphy says
Weird that the subscriber number is completely different to the one FeedBurner shows. You’d think Google would consider the FeedBurner one as more authoritative.
Andrew Allemann says
@ Kevin – I’ve always found feedburner to be unreliable anyway. It jumps all around. The GoogleReader # is just for subscribers using GoogleReader, so it should be accurate.