A blog owner really values the significance of having a RSS feed. An RSS feed really does bring out a blog and if you think about it, it’s very true. If you think of your daily routine when you browse through the blogosphere, have you realized that you may be checking the RSS feed count first? Yes, some of you may know what I’m talking about. The subscribers are the more valuable asset to a blog these days. Content doesn’t matter as much anymore as you can see by the guest post on John Chow’s “Money Making Online” blog. I actually enjoyed reading that particular post, but what happened to the related content to the topic? John’s high subscribers base allows him to do whatever, so you tell me if RSS subscribers is a valuable asset to a blogger 
Now that I got your attention, I want to know if you guys think that there is actual value in RSS subscribers or the infamous feed count. It’s absolutely hilarious how bloggers and blog readers are staring down at how many subscrbers a blog has that it has become something you should not even laugh at.
I started this blog in November and previous to starting this blog, I only read about 3 blogs and one of them were John Chow’s. You can say that I barely started noticing the potential of blogs back in the summer of 2007. I may be late, but I did notice a huge trend change. I remember subscribing those the 3 blogs that I visited just because I really enjoyed the content. To be honest, I did not even learn about subscribing to a blog until after I decided that I was going to open up a blog.
During the time I opened my blog was when all the commotion was being started about how bloggers could make money. This is a huge reason why the blogosphere has grown so much and a huge portion of the credit goes towards Entrecard. Although Entrecard has been bringing up all these new spam blogs…:-( .
If you recall, John Chow and Shoemoney had a contest battling to see who would receive the most RSS subscribers within a month. This contest was during October, which was just about the same time I purchased the Bloggin-Ads.com domain. Both of these top bloggers chose the route of requiring participants of the contest to subscribe to the Feedburner e-mail feed.
Feedburner introduced their new e-mail feed feature during April of 2006, but it wasn’t used as much as bloggers would think. Before this feature, Aweber and FeedBlitz were the main tools for e-mail subscribing. I believe that bloggers and blog readers would actually prefer to read a blog subscription through a feed reader such as BlogLines.
Anyways, subscribing to an e-mail feed was the easiest contest entry I’ve actually seen. Participants could even subscribe many different times with many different names if they would like to. There’s no way to track these things if you use a different name and e-mail. What John and Shoemoney didn’t realize was this contest started a whole new strategy of building a high RSS subscriber fan base, which boasts the feed count high. You could pretty much say it is like a forced subscribing type of method since the only way to get into the contest was to subscribe via e-mail. What happened to blog readers subscribing at their own will? 
Just about a month or two later, I started noticing blogs with huge feed counts in the hundreds or thousands. After doing a bit of research, the blog that I stumbled across was only opened about 2-3 days ago. Of course a blogger could transfer e-mail subscribers from other services such as Aweber (a popular one), but lets look at the big picture here.
The big picture is after the contest was coming to an end, Shoemoney popped out with over a few thousand extra subscribers. He did not even mention how it was ever obtained, but rumors started going around that he intentionally subscribed to his own feed via e-mail a few thousand times. This massively inflated the feed count causing John Chow to lose the competition. Maybe John Chow was using the black hat technique too, but Shoemoney has been around longer to know these things. None of us can assume anything, but the posts around the blogosphere highly suggested that there was cheating involved.
As soon as those posts started hitting all of the blogosphere, new and old bloggers started subscribing to themselves a few hundred or a few thousand times. It started getting out of control and it’s still being used now. If you think about it, what’s the value of an RSS subscriber now? Only the blog owner would know what’s happening, but would there be actual value in having subscribers if it’s just being cheated?
Apart from that, there are these groups that subscribe to each others blogs to help each other help. I have personally participated in such an event, but I soon realized that there isn’t much value in it whatsoever. These subscribers are still somehow being forced into subscribing to a blog feed.
Do you still believe in the RSS value?
When i see high number RSS feed subscribers on some blogs i know instantly that they are manipulated.I don’t really care about the number since i know that bloggers do all sorts of
things to have high rss number,so my answer to your question is that i don’t believe in rss value.
My last blog post is..The 7 Characteristics Of Rich People
I do think that the number of subscribers is important, even if you need to bribe people to subscribe. Because once you have thousands of them, you can do pretty much anything you feel like, just like you said.
My last blog post is..Search Engine Friendly Titles In Less Than 60 Seconds
For me, RSS still gives value to me because I have reader who are really interested to my blog…
Most people just add the RSS due to contests and never really make use of it… You can check your referrer registered at your visitor trackers and see how many actually came from the RSS…
Number of Feeds subscriber is very important. It will help increase and retain your traffic. Now its like this, almost 80% people believe that a blog with large number of RSS subscribers is good. About 50% of them will atleast revisit that blog once. Ya its true. I may be wrong about the percentage. But only few people do not consider RSS feeds.
Now I have a simple question. You visit two blog which blog on your most intersting topic. One has a RSS count of 1000 and other have mere 20. Which one will you chose to follow or revisit?
My last blog post is..You can Design you can Earn
inflating your rss subscribers by intentionally subscribing to your own feed is indeed useless. but running a contest and letting participants subscribe is more beneficial ..
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Hi Mike - I think the trouble is, if lots of people are cheating, advertisers won’t take RSS subscriber count seriously. I still think actual traffic is more important. Just because a blog has a lot of subscribers, doesn’t mean they’re all visiting it that often.
My last blog post is..From PTSD To Success - Is It Possible?
Hey Mike,
I think I was having a mini discussion on AIM about this… but I do still think RSS Feed subscribers are important but just like anything else, it can be manipulated.
I mean, look at Alexa, Technorati, etc… anything can be manipulated nowadays but it’s not going to help you so I don’t see what’s the point.
Jay
My last blog post is..DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites that Will Help You!
I removed the feed burner chicklet from my blog about two months ago. Now, a random surfer doesn’t know how many feed subscribers I have, and has to base value on the content, not some stat. Both my traffic and feed subscribers have increased since then.
Webomatica - But it just all depends on the niche and everything as well. Because on the flipside, there are a lot of people who flaunt their counts and it boosts… why do you think there are people who try to cheat their counts?
Jay
My last blog post is..Submit to 47 Social Bookmarking Sites in 15 Minutes and Make Money from it!
I indeed think there is a lot of value (and of course money) in increasing RSS subscriber base of your blog. I have been trying RSS since last 5-6 months and I can say I have been modestly successful. Can someone please tell me how do I increase my RSS subscriber base?
My last blog post is..Modus operandi of the ATM thieves…
[...] such a big deal out of it when it can be gamed just like anything else? Well, you should check out “Is there still value in RSS Subscribers?” written by Mike [...]