Wake up!

By exposing how easy it was to fake the subscriber count, I guess I wanted to say a little something to every advertiser out there: “Wake up!”. If you think this doesn’t apply to you because you’re not an advertiser you are wrong because the minute you comment on other blogs, you advertise your website. Advertising doesn’t mean paying money for an ad spot: to me it means having your brand displayed elsewhere. What I am about to say does apply to paid advertisement, but I’ll explain why it does apply to you also.

The main reason I think people are faking their RSS Subscriber count is to sell advertisements or reviews for more money. You know, some people will ask 25 or 30$ a month for an ad on their website simply because the feedburner chicklet shows 600 subscribers: it’s a common thing. Of course, you can check out some Alexa stats to make sure that number is real, but ShoeMoney has an Alexa Rank of 101,291 which makes me think Alexa is mostly crap. I also have another blog getting about 50 times more traffic than this blog with a crappy Alexa Rank as well. If we can’t really rely on Alexa Rank  – and I’ve talked about it in the past – it all comes down to the Feedburner subscriber count, right? Well it pisses me off because a lot of bloggers fake it and there is NO, absolutely NO return on investment when advertising on their blogs. It’s important for every advertiser out there to know what the real numbers are and I’m about to show you how (mostly).

I hope advertisers will read this because it will help them maximize their return on investment (ROI). The same applies to you, the average blogger with not so much money to invest in advertisement. I want everybody to make the wisest choice when it comes to advertisement and trusting the Feedburner chicklet is probably the worst decision of all.

I don’t pay for advertising, how does this apply to me?

You comment on blogs, you advertise. Whether or not you pay for it, every single time your link appear on a blog, it’s called advertising. Now, why does it matter? When you comment on blogs showing 600 subscribers, you’re actually making that blog a little more powerful because you’re advertisers more reasons to think the blog is active with real readers.

Can’t we use comments as a metric?

Unfortunately no, a lot of popular blogs out there don’t receive a lot of comments even if they have an impressive REAL number of subscribers. Take John Cow for example, he doesn’t receive 50 comments on every post, but he has a pretty good subscriber count and pretty good traffic. It’s a good indication, but we can’t use it as a very good metric.

Google Reader is the key

Not many people know that with Google Reader, you can get the number of subscribers subscribed via Google Reader for a particular feed! It doesn’t show you the real numbers because it only displays the number of subscribers subscribed using Google Reader, but this can give us a pretty good estimate. Where is that feature? It’s hidden a little bit, but when you select a particular feed in your Google reader, you will see a little “Show details” link and this link is the key! As an example, here’s are feed details for The Net Fool:

How can this help me get the real numbers?

Let’s do some maths here and compare the Google Reader count with the Feedburner chicklet on some blogs I have in my Google Reader:

I tried to include some well known sub 1000 blogs as well as some bigger blogs like Dosh Dosh, ShoeMoney and John Cow. There’s only 7 blogs in the list as I only took some blogs from my Google Reader and didn’t do an extensive search for feeds. While some might say it’s not that much and we can’t really get any statistics out of that, just check your Google Reader and you’ll notice it’s around 25% for a lot of blogs.  So you guys can basically do your own investigation, but you get the big picture and you know where I’m going with this.

What’s a “normal” ratio?

You’re the judge on that one, I don’t want to go out and say “Anybody under 10% is a cheater!”, I just want to raise a flag. I strongly encourage you to go through your list of feeds in Google Reader and check who looks suspicious. I unsubscribed to A LOT of feeds, especially in the MMO niche because of that and trust me, I know who’s faking it out there. I won’t point the finger at anyone as you’re all able to figure it out on your own.

I also want to point out that anybody with 300 Feedburner Subscribers and 15 Google Reader Subscribers is extremely suspicious. But as I said, you’re the judge.

Contests brings the ratio down

BS. While I agree contests are extremely popular and one of the requirements to get entries is to subscribe by email, I don’t think it would impact the count that much. I think most people will unsubscribe after the contest and subscribe to the feed via a reader if they like the blog. Even if people don’t unsubscribe, I’m not sure it can cause the ratio to go THAT down. The Net Fool ran a lot of contests and still has a pretty decent ratio. John Cow ran a lot of contests and has a pretty low ratio, but with 10,000 subscribers it really is a different game. We all know John Cow is getting traffic so there’s no question there.

I’m not saying ShoeMoney is cheating

Some might say, Shoe is at 5%, is he cheating? I don’t think so because if you check ShoeMoney, TechCrunch and big blogs like that the ratio is very low, mostly because the subscriptions come from so many different sources. For sub 1000 subscribers, it seems that the stats are pretty accurate. I also made some research online and it seems to be a well accepted fact that the Google Reader market Share is around 20-25% (That’s what it is on frogstr…)

Feedcompare.com

Another method Chris at chrisguthrie.net mentioned me is to actually have a look at feedcompare.com. It really is a nice website that let you have a look at how Feedburner feeds evolve into time. With it, you can actually see if there’s anything unusual on a feed if the feed in question has the “Awareness API” enabled. Mine isn’t enabled as I don’t like other websites and outside sources to have access to my feed without me knowing, but here is an example of a suspicious feed:

I’m not saying this guy is faking it, but going from 395 to 690 in two days is very suspicious…

You’re the judge

As I said, you’re the judge on this. I’m just saying you should be careful with the Feedburner count and don’t necessarily take it as a very good metric until you confirm the numbers by yourself. Google Reader is a good way to estimate the numbers and I honestly think 10-25% market share is a pretty accurate number. So, be careful when you buy advertisement, the Feedburner subscriber count shouldn’t always justify a higher price.

Prove me wrong

If you’re an honest blogger with 300 subscriptions and something like 15 Google Reader subscriptions It would be great if you could share some detailed stats. I would be more than happy to blog about it and say I was wrong!

Share this

I hope you guys will share this. Not because I want some link love, but because I want the community to know. I personally think the Google Reader subscriber count is a much better metric simply because Google Reader is the most popular reader out there and it’s a lot more harder to fake.

Always and forever #5

First of all, let’s start with one of the thing I hate about being a sponsor in BlogCatalog. While BlogCatalog assure you to be in the top 5 ranking for the category you sponsor, it is based on a first-come first-served basis. What does that mean? This simply mean that I was #5 to buy the spot and for this reason I’m #5 in the ranking. What’s that? I mean, the #1 pays 12$ a month and I also pay 12$ a month, why would the other website get a better ranking? Oh yeah, that’s true, the guy subscribed first! That’s ridiculous from my point of view and there should be something to rotate the websites across the top 5 spots. If there’s such an algorithm it must really suck as I haven’t seen my website above #5.

The price ain’t bad

I must admit the price ain’t bad. Depending on the category you want to sponsor, the price can vary between 8$ and 25$. The SEO category is currently 12$/month and it’s not that bad for a reach of 45 million visitors annually on BlogCatalog.

What about the traffic?

I’m getting traffic from BlogCatalog for sure, but I doubt it’s because of the sponsorship. Most of the traffic I get is from the friends and also because I get involved in the community a lot. I haven’t noticed a significant increase from BC in the past couple of days and I’m really disappointed with the service.

The directory doesn’t bring traffic

The reality with BlogCatalog is that people don’t usually reach your site via the directory. I mean, who’s browsing the damn directory, it’s a 10 years old technology! The real BlogCatalog traffic comes from friends, neighborhood, broadcasts and groups so it’s no surprise being a sponsor for a category doesn’t give you that much exposure.

I was expecting that kind of results and I mentioned it in my initial post. I analyzed other websites sponsoring categories and by looking at their public stats, their traffic didn’t seem to sky rocket because of BlogCatalog. I really wanted to try it, but I don’t think I’ll pay for another month.

Worth it?

No. With 12$ you could do so much more for your website. With a little 12$ you can pay someone to submit your website to like 750 link directories or something like that. It’s a much wiser investment to be honest. I had to try it but now it’s done. I’ll probably give some more feedback at the end of the month as now it’s only been a couple of days but I don’t think this will get better. Bottom line: invest that 12$ elsewhere.

Why?

Let’s start with the base principle of AdSense. Google actually “read” the content of your website to figure out what your page is about and deliver ads accordingly. For the particular subject your website is about, Google has a pool of potential campaigns to show. In these campaigns, certain have a high CPC (Cost per click), certain have an average CPC and others have a very low CPC. Google wants to make you and their advertisers happy, so that’s why they’ll try to provide you with ads having a good CPC, but if you offer enough ad spots on your site, they’ll definitely provide you with some crappy ads as well.

Now, let’s say you display 25 text links on your page from Adsense. For the particular subject your webpage is about, Google may only have something like 5 extremely good targeted ads with high CPC, 10 average ads and 10 crappy ads. If you display these 25 text links, there are good chances someone will click on one of them because there are so many, but there are 80% chances that the clicks you receive will have an average or very low CPC.

Now, let’s say you only put 5 text links. There are less chances for you to receive clicks, but the clicks will usually be worth more money! This is for the simple reason that google won’t display (Well, not every time) 5 crappy ads on a total of 5 possibilities.

So what’s the perfect balance?

You have to test a lot of different ad placements. For some websites, having more ads might bring more money and for some other sites, a single ad might do the job. On another website I worked on, I displayed only two ads and this was giving me more money than when I was displaying three or four. I received less clicks, but the clicks were actually giving me more money.

This trick won’t work if you don’t optimize your ad placement. Less ads will only be efficient if you know precisely where to place them to get clicks. I usually achieve this by “flooding” the page with ads and then analyzing the ones with the highest CTR (Click through rate). When you know the top spots on your page, it’s time to get rid of the poor performing ads. This way, your top spots will always receive the best ads and you’ll make more money out of the same traffic.

If a page full of ads does the trick for you, keep it this way. It depends a lot on the type of website you run and the type of traffic, so that’s why you have to test a lot of different scenarios. It is not science, but this technique works for me most of the time.