28 May 06

Feedburner, subscribers and the Zipf Distribution

Yesterday I converted my feeds into Feedburner feeds, not only to massage my ego over how many people read the site, but to help people new to RSS a better indication of what feeds actually do. It gives a nice interface to the feed, rather than being some meaningless XML tree, which obviously is better and more usable. You can view my RSS in Feedburner here (and you can subscribe to it if you haven’t) and yes, it’s nice so a big two thumbs up to Feedburner’s service.

Feedburner offer a service to put a reader count called FeedCount on your site too. Here’s an example of a FeedCount, taken from, sigh, no not my blog, but 37signals’ Signal vs. Noise. This got me thinking: do I really want to put a count on my site?

My site is surprisingly not as popular as the 37signals one above. Don’t know why. It doesn’t get as many readers as they do. In fact, it gets a lot less, so why would I want to publicise the fact that only a few people read the blog? Wouldn’t the small number put people off subscribing? Would they feel that because the number of readers is small that my ramblings wouldn’t be worth subscribing, seeing that other people aren’t subscribing too?

Jakob Nielsen, the quite-famous usability expert has an article about web popularity and the Zipf distribution. Despite the article being over 9 years old now, it’s still relevant and interesting today.

Zipf curves follow a straight line when plotted on a double-logarithmic diagram.

Which means that:

1. a few elements that score very high
2. a medium number of elements with middle-of-the-road scores
3. a huge number of elements that score very low

Meaning that only very few blogs get high amounts of traffics, some blogs get medium amounts of traffic, and lots of blogs get hardly any traffic. But we knew this anyway, didn’t we? For every thousand teenage MySpace emo style blogs, there’s a SVN or TechCrunch.

Why would people want to be associated with the lower end of the Zipf distribution? I certainly don’t. I’d rather people subscribe based on my (frankly low-to-average) quality of writing than because Feedburner’s FeedCount says I have more readers than X, Y or Z.

I do remember seeing one site a while back with a FeedCount of one. Now, his writing wasn’t bad. It wasn’t brilliant. But it definitely wasn’t bad, so I kind of felt sorry for his lowly count of one subscriber – which was probably him checking his own feed, I’m sure everyone else does it, don’t they? But the fact that he only had a single reader completely put me off subscribing, despite his perfectly-subscribable not-bad-but-not-good writing.

I don’t want to fall into the trap of no one subscribing because no one else. Hence the lack of FeedCount here. I’ll wait until I have over 20,000 readers like 37signals. Which is any day now…

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