How Many People Read Your Articles?

Attention: Don’t read this if you despise meta blogging!

Once in a while I do what probably every blogger does: I check the number of feed subscribers and the number of visitors to my blog. I don’t do that regularly, though, because the numbers are low and don’t change much anyway. However I was much surprised last night when having a look at the FeedBurner statistics.

FeedBurner’s Reach

FeedBurner is not only publishing the number of feed subscribers but also a measurement called Reach, introduced about two years ago. According to FeedBurner Reach means:

Reach is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed.

Also it means:

Additionally, there may be people viewing your content beyond your known subscriber base. For example, they may view your content on a feed search engine or news filter site.

Usually Reach is only a small percentage of the number of feed subscribers. Sometimes this number even equals zero, at least for this blog. Well, that’s not really surprising considering the sporadic updates of the blog. However things changed after my last article.

Not only did the number of Reach increase, it even surpassed the number of feed subscribers. The following day Reach was three times more than the number of feed subscribers. I was stunned last night when realizing this. How could this happen? I had a look at Google Analytics expecting a considerable increase in visitors to the blog. Of course, there was the usual increase after a new article was published, but nothing spectacular. I double-checked with StatCounter but the same results.

Shared Article

Both analytic tools showed something interesting, though. Visitors came from various social media sites: Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and some more. I had visitors from those sites before, of course, but this time they outnumbered any other sources. And that’s probably the reason for the high number of Reach. The article was shared and re-shared on various platforms by different people. I don’t know who shared the article and I don’t know on which platforms it appeared. But it seems it had found its readers.

Nothing changed for this blog, though. The number of visitors and the number of feed readers stayed the same, basically. Also I don’t know how exactly FeedBurner is measuring Reach. It’s probably exaggerated and not accurate. But it is obvious to me that not only page views are dead but also feed subscriber numbers.