Top Blogs On Google Reader
So Google recently made it fairly easy to determine the number of Google Reader subscribers around a particular blog. Gabe Rivera at Techmeme did a little work on excel and came up with an unofficial list of the top blogs and the number of subscribers each blog has on Google Reader.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google quietly opened up its feed data last month: the September Webmaster Central post on subscriber stats let publishers see how many people read their feeds through Google's crawler, turning what had been private aggregation into a countable number. A month later, Techmeme's Gabe Rivera has done the spreadsheet work to turn those counts into an unofficial leaderboard of the top blogs on Google Reader.
The story traveled fast for a stats post — ProBlogger and Scobleizer both picked it up the same day — because it hands the blog world something it has lacked: a single, comparable audience metric from the largest feed reader. Whether those numbers actually measure reach is already contested territory.
First-order effects
- Bloggers can now see, and compare, exactly how many subscribers they hold on Google Reader specifically — making the reader's share of each blog's total audience visible for the first time.
- Gabe Rivera's compiled ranking gives advertisers, sponsors, and fellow bloggers a ready-made proxy for which blogs have the largest committed audiences, independent of raw pageview claims.
Second-order effects
- Feed-subscriber counts become a bargaining chip in blog advertising and sponsorship conversations, pressuring blogs to push readers toward Google Reader or at least to report per-client breakdowns.
- Other RSS clients face implicit pressure to expose equivalent subscriber data, since a leaderboard built on one client's numbers makes every non-reporting client look like a blind spot.
Third-order effects
- If platform-reported counts become the standard currency of blog influence, the platforms that control the counters gain power over how the blog economy measures itself — a shift from self-reported traffic to gatekeeper-audited audiences.
- The episode foreshadows recurring fights over whether these stats measure real engagement: any single-client count conflates active reading with stale, abandoned subscriptions, and rankings built on it inherit that distortion.
The trend: Blog influence measurement is shifting from self-reported traffic toward platform-disclosed subscriber counts, with whoever operates the largest reader effectively setting the industry's scoreboard.