Should you display a subscriber count?
Marcin made this comment:
Now the thing is, does publicizing the number of subscribers you have improve subscriber numbers? My logic being: a visitor sees that there are quite a bit of people subscribed to a blog, it must be a good one, so they then subscribe to the feed.Just wondering what your thoughts were on the subject.
After reading others comments, it looks like the argument for displaying feed counts is two-fold:
- Quality Assurance – Some individuals feel that a strong subscriber count means good, quality content.
- Marketing Benefits – A strong SC may help attract advertising options as well as additional readers.
Personally, I don’t think it matters all that much. If your content is good and you constantly receive feedback from your users, it really doesn’t mean that much.
Some of you may remember that I had Feedburner stats on BlogSecurity when it first started a few months back. My reasons for removing it were personal more then anything else.
I kept getting distracted by how many visitors I had coming to the site verse how many were subscribing. Don’t get me wrong, I think its important to track, plan and set goals. However, I sometimes think we can get carried away with stats and forget the purpose and reason why we started blogging in the first place.
Out of interest, BlogSec currently sits at around 450-550 subscribers. We started BlogSec in May, so we are growing by an average of around 100 subscribers per/month.
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Comments
Neena, I’m happy with our growth (%) but with 2-3 million WP users alone, I don’t think our reach is near enough.
Neena, I personally think it can work in your benefit if its low or high but like Darren from progblogger.net often says, if in doubt experiment for a couple of weeks and see what happens, it wont hurt :)
[...] I came across a post at BlogSecurity.net called Should You Display a Subscriber Count? Here David discussed the pros and cons of showing how many subscribers your blog has, and he [...]
It’s an interesting issue – people may take a subscriber count as *just* a number, rather than taking it into context of growth, how long a site’s been active etc.
Let us know how it goes. Like I said, we removed it from BlogSec because I just found it to distracting.
I used to have my subscriber numbers showing on my blog, but took it off because I couldn’t help but notice and be somewhat distracted by the fluctuations of numbers. I now only check out my numbers every couple of weeks or so, otherwise I think I’d go nuts if I saw the numbers drop of significantly.
I guess with any blogger, as hard as we try to create content that will interest many and bring in subsequent traffic, I always remember that you just can’t please everyone all the time.
[...] were discussions round the blogosphere whether bloggers should display subscriber count. I have chosen to display it now as the count is getting to a stable [...]
Congratualtions on such a strong subscriber count. What you think the minimum subscriber count should be before you start to display your subscriber numbers?