Re:Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?
by petercooper on Monday January 05, 2009 @07:44AM
(#420339)
They're more believable than many other guessed metrics that are used online - Alexa, Compete, et al.
Services like Google Reader report their subscriber numbers in the user agent string to FeedBurner and these are then included into the total. The remainder is worked out from IP accesses, user agents, etc. It's not precise, but in terms of the relationship between one feed and another, quite reliable.
There have been ways to "game" the figures here and there (such as the Netvibes trick that went around a few months ago) but these are usually picked up and solve and reputable content providers were not using them in the first place.
A lot of people believe in numbers from places like Alexa or Compete and they're far more shady than FeedBurner's numbers. My own analysis has shown the numbers to be "reasonably" accurate, based over my own cumulative 30,000 or so subscribers on a few different feeds.
Services like Google Reader report their subscriber numbers in the user agent string to FeedBurner and these are then included into the total. The remainder is worked out from IP accesses, user agents, etc. It's not precise, but in terms of the relationship between one feed and another, quite reliable.
There have been ways to "game" the figures here and there (such as the Netvibes trick that went around a few months ago) but these are usually picked up and solve and reputable content providers were not using them in the first place.
A lot of people believe in numbers from places like Alexa or Compete and they're far more shady than FeedBurner's numbers. My own analysis has shown the numbers to be "reasonably" accurate, based over my own cumulative 30,000 or so subscribers on a few different feeds.