The Blogs & Search Blogs With The Most Readers

Which blogs have the most feed subscribers from Self Made Minds is an
excellent rundown on top blogs according to the number of RSS or feed
subscribers they have, according to FeedBurner.

Search Marketing Blogs by RSS Subscribers from Lee Odden at the Online
Marketing Blog takes the idea and focuses it on search blogs. Below, a bit more
on how this starts to turn FeedBurner counts into a preferred currency for blogs
seeking respect — plus how to tap into the feed counts for some FeedBurner-hosted feeds, even if they aren’t published online.

FeedBurner is a great feed
management service that among many other things provides estimates about how
many

subscribers take your feed. If you don’t use FeedBurner yourself, you
probably recognize these subscribers counts from the "FeedCount chicklet" that
some sites use to share their own counts with the public. For example, here’s our own FeedCount chicklet:

See how we have 9,704 readers as of today, for our main
Search Engine Land feed?

Self Made Minds visited a variety of sites to see if they posted chicklets
and then listed them in order of most readers to fewest (currently, we’re 38th on
the top 100 list there). Online Marketing Blog focused only on search blogs and added a
few that weren’t on the Self Made Minds list.

John Battelle’s Search Blog comes up
first on that list of search blogs, with 67,893 readers as of today. My old site, the
Search Engine Watch Blog,
comes in second at 23,347 readers. Problogger and
CopyBlogger come third and
fourth, then Search Engine Land gets
ranked fifth.

If you consider Problogger and CopyBlogger not to be search-specific enough, then Search Engine Land rises to third. Woohoo! We’ve been going for just over
four months, so I’m pretty happy with that. Want to help? Take our feed!
Full details here, or just
dive in with this:

What if you get to a site but don’t see a FeedCount chicklet listed? If they
use FeedBurner — AND IF THEY’VE ENABLED FEEDCOUNT INTERNALLY — then you can do
this.

The chicklet is an image that comes from FeedBurner, and you can call it up
in your browser like this:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/UNIQUE-FEED-NAME

See that UNIQUE-FEED-NAME part? Now you need to find someone using FeedBurner,
which is usually pretty easy. The generally show the FeedBurner domain in their
feed URL. For example, if I go over to Pronet Advertising and click on their big
feed icon, I see their feed URL like this:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/PronetAdvertising

See the last part in bold, after the slash? That’s their unique FeedBurner
feed ID. No one else can use that ID. So you take that ID and put it into the
image code I showed earlier:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/PronetAdvertising

Alternatively, just take the original feed URL and insert /~fc after the
feedburner.com part like this:

https://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/PronetAdvertising

Enter the URL into your browser, and the image will load with the feed’s
current count.

Remember, this only works if someone has enabled FeedCount. It’s helpful
especially if a site had a chicklet up at one point but later removed it, and
you still want to see counts.

Now to the currency part. Want to be in Self Made Mind’s list? Want to be in
Online Marketing Blog’s list? Want to be in any of the similar lists that will
no doubt spring up? You’ll need to have a FeedBurner FeedCount. No FeedCount, no
inclusion. And so FeedBurner’s counts might find themselves inching closer to
being the currency of choice for feed subscriber reporting.

Trying to understand more about how subscribers numbers are created, how they
can be influenced and using FeedBurner in general? Here are three key articles
from us to check out:

• The Numbers Behind
  Your Feeds
• Google Reader
  Reporting Subscriber Numbers, Offers New Publishers Guide
• Stay Master Of
  Your Feed Domain

Oh — and take our feed!