Feeds That Matter

Posted on October 9, 2005

A Reuters article has some interesting data from Bloglines about how many feeds have a significant number of subscribers. Here is a breakdown of the Bloglines data provided in the article.

1.3 million feeds have at least one subscriber on Bloglines.

Only 437 feeds have over 1,000 subscribers.

Only 60 feeds have 5,000 subscribers or more.

Slashdot.org has 50,000 subscribers to its feed at Bloglines.

Jim Lanzone comments on the Reuters article in a post on the Ask Jeeves blog.

On the other hand, no, the full universe of blogs (or other sites that publish feeds) do not "matter" as much as others. It's natural that, as all this new content is created, not all of it will find a regular audience. Eric made the good point in our discussion that the blogosphere's audience curve is following the same trends as other media, as well as Web 1.0 sites. Thus, only 437 feeds (which contain a large number of blogs) have at least 1,000 people subscribing to them, and only 60 have 5,000 or more. I think this is more the point Eric's article tried to make than the fact that the rest of the blogosphere is irrelevant.