Find the RSS Subscriber Count with Google Reader

The RSS subscriber count gives you an idea of the number of unique users who may have subscribed to the RSS feed of a particular website or a blog.
People may subscribe to a RSS feed in different ways – they may use an online RSS reader (like Google Reader or Netvibes), an offline reader (like FeedDemon or Reeder), through email newsletters, toolbars or even mail clients like Microsoft Outlook. The RSS subscriber count is an approximate summation of all these numbers.

Determining the RSS Numbers

If a site is syndicating its RSS feed via FeedBurner and have made the stats public, you can easily determine the number of RSS subscribers of their feed using the FeedBurner Chicklet.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/XYZ (replace XYZ with your feed alias)

Just replace XYZ in the above URL with the feed name and you should see an image representing the RSS subscriber count – see example.

However, not all sites may be using FeedBurner and in that case, we can still get an approximate number of RSS feed subscribers using Google Reader
.
Go to the feed discovery page, type the feed address (URL) in the “search by keyword” box and hit Enter. You may also use keywords but a full feed address will show the perfect match.

These numbers are however approximate as they only include the RSS subscriber base of Google Reader, iGoogle and Google Desktop users as determined by Google FeedFetcher.
Here’s a quick analysis of the RSS numbers of some well-known sites as suggested by Google Reader. As you may have noticed, some of these sites are hugely popular but have lower subscribers counts probably because more people are using other means – like email newsletters or offline RSS readers – to subscribe to that feed.