Top 40 sites according to FeedBurner stats

FeedBurner is a popular RSS feed manager, with over 600.000 feeds in their roster. One of the advantages it offers is tracking the statistics for your RSS feed usage. Publishers can also choose to go public with this data, and many of them are displaying the number of their RSS subscribers, according to FeedBurner, on their site. (for example, on this site, it’s the little chicklet in the right side of the header; click it, and you will get an option to subscribe to the RSS feed for FranticIndustries in the feed reader of your choice)

However, FeedBurner, for some reason, isn’t trying to be a popularity measuring tool. They have the data. They have the capabilities. Yet, they’re not maintaining any sort of top list of feeds with the most subscribers. The number of RSS subscribers is not the ultimate way to measure the popularity of a website, but it’s a really important metric. If FeedBurner were to maintain such a top list, it would be at least as important as Technorati and Alexa’s top lists.

Besides waiting for FeedBurner to actually do a top list, the second best thing I could do is to create my own list of top blogs according to their FeedBurner RSS subscriber data. Maybe this experiment encourages the folks at FeedBurner to do the same thing themselves.

Bear in mind that this list is obtained in completely unscientific ways, as I simply checked out the number of RSS subscribers for blogs I know to be very popular (over 500 of them) and who have their RSS subscriber number public, and created the list from those numbers. I might have (and probably did) miss some – if you have a correction, please let me know so I can add it to the list. In any case, this list is not meant to be a definitive metric of any kind. It’s just here to tickle curiosity.

*I’ve focused on English blogs only, anything else would be far to complicated for me to do
**the numbers below are live, which means they can change over time, and the rankings might become wrong. However, it will be fun to see who went up and who went down from this point
***I chose to go with 40 sites because roughly after that number there’s a huge number of sites with similar numbers of RSS subscribers, so it gets much harder sorting them all out
****Update: I’ve updated the list with some of the suggestions from the comments, so it’s now a bit bigger than Top40, but also a bit more accurate.

So, here it is, the top 40 sites according to the number of their RSS subscriptions, as measured by FeedBurner:

1. BoingBoing

2. TechCrunch

3. Simply Recipes

4. Interesting Thing of the Day

5. 43Folders

6. Mashable

7. DumbLittleMan

8. 37signals

9. John Battelle’s Searchblog

10. CrunchGear

11. Read/Write Web

12. Coding Horror

13. How to Change the World by Guy Kawasaki

14. MicroPersuasion

15. Duct Tape Marketing

16. DiggNation

17. GoogleOperatingSystem

18. LifeHack

19. TreeHugger

20. FrenchMaidTV

21. Small Business Trends

22. Jeff Clavier’s Software Only

23. A VC

24. Search Engine Watch

25. My Personal Finance Journey

26. ProBlogger

27. Chris Pirillo

28. On The Media

29. FeedBurner

30. Vitamin

31. UberGizmo

32. Get Rich Slowly

33. Web2Explorer

34. ParentHacks

35. Particle Tree

36. Political Wire

37. Copyblogger

38. Writers Write

39. Mac Mega Site

40. Emily Chang

41. Photoshop Killer Tips

42. eHub

43. French For Beginners

44. MobileCrunch

45. GeekZone

46. TheRssBlog

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**. FranticIndustries

As you can see, this site – while not doing bad – is still far from the top 50. I’m putting it here in the hope that some day, it’ll be in this highly respected company. If you’d like to help me get there, now is the time to subscribe to my RSS feed.

Source : www.franticindustries.com