Rating Burner Debuts With RSS Feed Ranking, Growth Stats
There's precious little that bloggers like to do more than measure their own statistics, and gauge how they're doing, relative to the rest of the blogging community. And there's similarly precious little that smart Web developers …
Context & Ripple Effects
Rating Burner lands in the middle of an argument the blogging world has been having with itself for over a year: how much feed statistics can actually be trusted. Mashable called Google Reader's subscriber stats unreliable with proof back in October 2007, and Scripting News was asking the same month whether anyone even needed a new top-100 list to sort blogs by popularity.
Against that backdrop of skepticism, a third-party service that ranks feeds publicly is betting the opposite way — that bloggers want more comparative measurement, not less. It extends a line running back to the 2006 jab that RSS was little more than a glorified favorites feature: the protocol's value keeps getting re-litigated through the metrics layered on top of it.
First-order effects
- Bloggers get a public leaderboard keyed to subscriber counts and growth rates, turning private dashboard numbers into comparable rankings they can display and compete on.
- The service sits on top of feed-publisher data rather than generating its own, making whoever controls the underlying feed stats — FeedBurner foremost among them — the de facto arbiter of the leaderboard.
Second-order effects
- Rankings amplify whatever inaccuracies exist in feed counting: if reader-reported numbers are shaky, as the late-2007 criticism argued, a public leaderboard turns those errors into visible standings and raises pressure on feed platforms to tighten their methodology.
- Incumbent blog-rankers face a new comparison point — if a feed-based ranking diverges from link- or traffic-based lists, advertisers and sponsors gain grounds to question which metric they should be buying against.
Third-order effects
- If comparative feed metrics become a standard currency, blog measurement consolidates around whichever platform's counters the rankers trust, echoing the wider pattern where benchmarks become market interfaces — the number itself starts setting prices for sponsorships and placements.
- Public growth leaderboards create incentives to game the metric, pushing the ecosystem toward audited or multi-source measurement the way earlier traffic-measurement disputes did.
The trend: Blog measurement is shifting from self-reported badges toward third-party leaderboards built on feed data, with the credibility of the underlying counters becoming the contested ground.