Ouch. Just like Marshall Kirkpatrick said here. I had but two subscribers to my blog seven months ago. But that was when I wasn’t serious about blogging.
Fast-forward to present: I now have 2800 subscribers. Looking at my Feedburner stats, most of my supposed subscribers come from feed aggregator Rojo. I have reported this concern to the Feedburner crew, and they replied with this (not verbatim):
Your stats are as accurate as the data that is reported to us by the large aggregators. Sometimes some of these aggregators (like Rojo) start sending us bad subscriber data, which can cause fluctuations in your subscriber numbers.
True enough, I checked my RSS page on Rojo, and it does appear that more than 2000 are subscribed to it. Even Jason Calacanis was surprised by the numbers Rojo is raking in.
Subscribers to two other blogs I maintain are also on the rise, and guess where the bulk is coming from? Rojo.
Add that Rojo chicklet to your site fast, and, traffic permit, see your readers zoom.
But are these actual subscribers or is this just incorrectly being reported by Rojo?
Ajay, you can check the number of subscribers to your feed if it’s already in Rojo. I checked mine, and the numbers were indeed correct.
Yeah, Rojo is sending incorrect data. I have 100+ subscribers (but it fluctuates every now and then).
That does seem very high. Rojo is getting a lot more popular, but I doubt any blog has 2800 Rojo readers – I don’t even know if they have that many users.
BoingBoing only has 131 subs on Rojo at the moment, and while TechCrunch shows 8993 one page, it shows very few elsewhere (for example here: http://www.rojo.com/feed/Tda5eXxggQd6MgHq?m=1 – see “Feed Info”). I think their metrics are off.