How many RSS subscribers do you have? Rude question?
June 10th, 2008
I was reading the comments of a fairly new blog today and one reader had asked the author how many RSS subscribers they currently had.
The author ignored that commenter but chose to respond to all of the other comments.
Personally, I think it’s kind of a rude question. Possibly along the same lines as “How much money do you make?” or “How old are you?”.
Some people don’t mind giving out that information because they either have numbers to respond with that are enviable to most people, or they just don’t care what other people think.
Others might be offended at having being asked that question because they’re ashamed of the numbers and don’t want to be somewhat forced into a situation where they have to give out that information.
If someone asked me that question in the comments of my blog, I would probably ignore them too. I’m not afraid of people knowing how many RSS subscribers I have (even though you’d probably laugh hysterically if you knew) but I think it’s a tad rude to ask questions like that - especially in such a public forum.
What do you think? I’d love to know your thoughts.
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Entry Filed under: General
3 Comments Add your own
1. TrishaJ | June 10th, 2008 at 2:35 am
Lol @ your P.S.
I honestly don’t know how many RSS subscribers that I have. Lately, I haven’t even been checking my stats. Why? Well, Technorati says one thing, Google Reader says another, MyBlogLog, another, and so on and so forth. I’ve also noticed that the stats you get from Google Analytics and the stats you get from SiteMeter for the same day are different. What the heck are you supposed to believe? Lastly, the only people that I care about reading my blog are my friends; either my real life friends or my blogger friends. Superficial hits that I get from Entrecard or MyBlogLog don’t really count anyway. I have more that I would like to say on this subject but I already wrote you a novel. I’ll bug off now.
Wait. Yes, I do think it’s rude to ask someone how many subscribers they have. It’s like asking how much they paid for their house or something equally personal.
2. Cassie | June 10th, 2008 at 2:42 am
I agree, my stats all show me different numbers too. It’s frustrating as hell but at least I have a general idea.
I check Feedburner to see how many RSS subscribers I have but I’m sure that isn’t 100% accurate either. In fact, I know it isn’t.
Thanks for commenting Trisha.
3. Kiltak | June 12th, 2008 at 2:34 am
It all depends on how many you have I guess… too few may make you look “unprofessional”… but when you hit a few hundreds, I don’t see why people should hide it.
I display it proudly at the top of my blog
It lets advertisers know that the blog has an audience.
Feedburner is accurate.. but it only displays the number of readers who actually did something with your feed on a particular day. You’ll notice that if you post 5 articles on a day, the number will go up, and if you publish nothing it will crash down.
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