Michael Arrington has posted that TechCrunch has reached the 1,000,000 subscriber mark on FeedBurner. First off, congrats to TechCrunch; I have never seen someone hit that milestone before.
I don’t know that they really have one million subscribers, but I do know they have at least one… me.
I use NetNewsWire on my laptop and my phone. They both sync with NewsGator.com which pulls the feed for me and reports a subscriber to FeedBurner. Sometimes the NewsGator sync doesn’t work right so I turn it off. At that point my laptop appears to be a second subscriber to FeedBurner. As I go through my day I may check feed from my home, a coffee shop or two, and my office (subscriptions 3 and 4).
Of course, I have tried out many other feed readers. Some of them are web-based and continue to report that I am a subscriber. Off the top of my head I know Google Reader and Bloglines do (subscriptions 5 and 6). I am sure there are more places I have uploaded my OPML file that would each report me as an additional RSS subscriber.
I am in no way doubting that TechCrunch is one of the most widely read blogs on the internet. I just think it is completely within the realm of reason to assume that the actually number of people subscribing to the TechCrunch feed is 20% of what FeedBurner is reporting.
How do I know and why do I care?
At one point in time I added the “number of subscribers” metric to statzen.com. As I dug in and saw what was really happening I realized that it is just a bad number; it does not represent what it portrays to represent. It can be skewed so far in either direction that the number becomes meaningless.
