How do you measure a blog’s readership?

Posted Thursday, June 2, 2005 at 12:57am in Blogging  | 

Following up from a discussion on measuring readership of a blog on Richard Bailey’s PR Studies. Due to the different methods available, I began thinking about how do you find an exact measurement of a blog’s readership?

For example, some people don’t use RSS readers at all and rely on the old fashioned way of clicking on the actual blog itself. Then there is the FeedBurner subscription service which will let you know how many subscribe via BlogLines, My Yahoo!, Newsgator or My MSN. Also some blogs (including my own) have their own RSS feed which people can subscribe to.

For example, my FeedBurner feed is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/PrBlogger

And my blog’s own feed is:

http://www.prblogger.com/index.php?feed=rss2

Some people have an email subscription where subscribers can receive updates of the blog via email. One company that provide this is Bloglet.

Some people may even track them in Live Bookmarks in their Firefox browser.

So there we have 5 different methods of reading a blog. How do you take a measurement from these? Simply adding them up wouldn’t be possible for two reasons:

1. Some RSS readers including Live Bookmarks can’t be tracked. So you don’t know how many has subscribed by this method.

2. If you added the blog page hits to the subscription feeds this would be inaccurate as people tend to read through their RSS readers first and then log onto the blog to post a comment. Which would imply that there are two readers (of the blog) when there is only one.

If there is one, what would be the most accurate method of measuring blog readership?

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