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Did you ever wonder who is counted as an RSS subscriber on a daily basis?

As far as the people that subscribe via feed reader are concerned, they are counted as long as they actually open up your feed in the previous 24 hours. This means that a feed reader subscriber is only counted is they actually read your feed. What this means is that we all have a lot more subscribers than the ones that show on the FeedBurner number since most people don´t read their feeds daily.

Included in the daily FeedBurner tally are also the people that read via email. But contrary to what most people think, it´s not enough for you to subscribe via email to be counted as an email reader. FeedBurner has a way of telling if the email is actually being opened, and only in this case are you counted an email RSS reader. All this is very easy to confirm by checking your FeedBurner account. Lets see this example from my blog.

According to the following graph, available in my FeedBurner account under “Analyze” and then “Feed Stats - Subscribers”, you can see that I had 694 RSS readers the previous day.

If you look at these numbers in more detail, you can that of the 694 subscribers, 289 read the feed by email. Now, still in my FeedBurner account, under “Publicize” and “Email Subscriptions” I can see that my blog has 380 RSS email subscribers. The difference between the 380 and 289 represents the 91 readers that didn´t open their emails the previous day.

Having said this, I cann´t really tell you if this has always been this way, or if it´s a more recent move by FeedBurner to make the RSS number more credible. I am also not sure if the number of email readers is only for the previous day, or if it counts readers that open their emails every other day for example. Either way, it´s an important improvement since the number of RSS subscribers is becoming an important benchmark, and is even used to help value blogs.