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October 12, 2007

Find the Number of Google Subscribers for Any Feed

Google exposed the number of Google Reader / iGoogle subscribers to a feed in the crawler's user-agent and in the Webmaster Console, but that's only useful for your own feed. What if you want to see how many subscribers Google Operating System has?

Now you can see the number of subscribers by searching for the feed in Google Reader: click on "Add subscription", enter the name of a blog or some parts of your feed's URL and you'll see the number of subscribers next to each (hopefully relevant) result. This number includes everyone who subscribed to a feed using Google, but the subscribers aren't necessarily active.

It's not very clear whether Google Reader shows the subscribers from all Google properties (iGoogle, orkut) or only Google Reader subscribers. FeedBurner's stats show higher numbers of Google subscribers than Google Reader.

Google Reader:

FeedBurner:

Update: Mihai Parparita confirms that "these numbers include subscribers across all Google services". There's a difference between FeedBurner's numbers and Google Reader's numbers because FeedBurner counts the subscribers to all of the feeds that redirect to the FeedBurner feed.

24 comments:

  1. Ah I noticed that one too, and immediately went and looked up TechCrunch. Something above 100,000 if I remember correctly, higher than the official Google Blog. That sort of reflects some of the top blogs charts. But, and that goes for any blog that's starting to become popular, there might be a self-increasing factor at work: once you reach a certain popularity, your blog is included in blog charts and default bundles, which may make even more people subscribe.

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  2. The number is false for many feed.
    For example, for Zorgloob it shows its Feedburner feed and say "5 subscribers". That is complety wrong because Feedburner shows me about 6000 readers for the same feed....

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  3. I think it works with numbers subscribed by google reader. Feedburner works by people accessing the feedburner feed. So feedburner is always going to know of more users than google reader... except when the feed includes non-feedburner readers, of course.

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  4. Google should just make this number easily accessible in each feed like with other web readers, instead of doing searches and looking for the proper urls.

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  5. Has anyone verified the accuracy of this? Obviously there's a discrepancy between what's shown here and what's being reported by Feedburner. Anyway, this is a good feature, and will help us better get a good idea of our readership.

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  6. That's sweet though, finally blogspot users can see how many readers they have in google reader (you can already see in bloglines).

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  7. I can't see this number on my blog. And I know there are people who have subscribed to it. Can someone paste a screen shot telling where is this number displayed?

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  8. @~nm:
    You won't see the number in your blog, only in Google Reader. Click on "Add subscription", do a search for your blog's name and you'll see the number of subscribers. If you don't see "Add subscription", press u or click on the small arrow from the left of the window to make the sidebar visible.

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  9. The results are not accurate!

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  10. Even I can't see any search results. In fact, I don't know how this becomes a search.

    When I type mahendrap.wordpress.com in the add subscription dialog box, it remains as it is. There is no 'search'. Will someone please explain? I'd love to have this functionality to learn about my readers! Thanks in advance.

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  11. Ah! Got it now. The trick is to enter an incomplete URL of your feed, and hit Add. So the search results show up and you can see the number of subscribers!

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  12. A comment and manual trackback: Congrats for launching a small blog storm! I did a roundup post that included an alternate way to search (starting from "Browse"), links to 2 data lists, details on counting multiple feeds, and various bugs & hidden features. Subsequent posts covered Mashable's critique and added a "long tail" chart.

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  13. This is not proper. actually we need to subscribe it but nothing appears on my site.
    well thnax anyways.

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  14. awesome... works amazing

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  15. i don't think it works anymore.. i tried.. the search won't show the number of subscribers

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  16. yeah ibrahim it dont really work i also tried.

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  17. Awesome ......................that Why We love Google

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  18. it work not well I think it works with numbers subscribed by google reader.

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  19. It doesnt work at all, number of subscribers don't show in the reader at all, after adding. Only the number of articles are shown.

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  20. After you type some keywords in the "add subscription" box, you'll see a list of search results. Next to each result, Google Reader shows the number of subscribers.

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  21. I just want to know that how to show up subscriber count on blogger?

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  22. Does anybody know how to get the amount os subscribers and use this number anywhere on the site?

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  23. Google reader service was deprecated ... does anyone know any alternate ways other than https://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc

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