Google Reader Stats are a Crock

Google Reader stats, in case you don’t know, are bullshit. In fact, all Feedburner stats for most top blogs are bullshit due to the effect of default feeds. Want 80,000 free subscribers? How about 200K or more? Read on.

A default feed, in case you don’t know, is a feed which is presented to users on signup. Google Reader, for instance, pushes new users to these feed bundles: instead of searching for feeds you like, just grab a bundle on a certain topic. This is a great boost for those sites that can get themselves listed in these bundles: often by striking a deal with the feedreader company or being friends with the owner.

At Mashable we know this topic very well: back in late 2006, we got ourselves a default feed on the Pageflakes homepage, resulting in a huge boost for our subscriber numbers - 300K+ at one point. Except that if you visited Pageflakes once and never came back, you were still counted as a subscriber. Pageflakes eventually made changes to correct this overcount, but people were unlikely to trust our Feedburner count after that. And yet the issue continues to affect other blogs.

Google Reader’s Default Feeds

This weekend Google Reader released its stats, and I see the exact same problem: all the “top” feeds are actually the default feeds. In fact, many of the most popular feeds don’t actually exist. Neither do the subscribers. Some examples:

Footbag Worldwide is a site about the sport of hacky sack, which is a bit of a joke sport even in the US. And yet, it’s massively popular on Google Reader, with 74,043 subscribers! You’ll automatically get subscribed to this feed if you click the Sports bundle once you’ve signed up to Google Reader (http://www.footbag.org/index2/index.rss).

Here’s the real clincher: the Footbag Worldwide feed does not exist. Either Google’s engineers made a mistake and included the wrong URL, or the feed has since been discontinued. It either doesn’t load or loads with no content. We can therefore conclude that Google Reader will add around 74K to your subscriber count if your feed is in the Sports bundle, even if that feed doesn’t actually exist.

http://mashable.com/2007/10/15/google-reader-stats-are-bullshit-with-proof/