That said, when doing research, it is possible to draw some conclusions if you compare site A to site B on a decent system like comScore, Quantcast, etc. You won't know specific pageviews of Site B, but you'll likely know if they're a similar size, an order of magnitude higher or an order of magnitude lower.

And, when part of your business is acquisitions, that quick checkpoint is a useful piece of information

A lot of people (outside Yahoo!) made a big deal when it looked like MyBlogLog's stats were dropping on Compete.com. There is no way to say, "Hey, we were bought by Yahoo! TONS of our content is now being served off of the yahoo.com domain which we are not getting credit for."

I even did a post on our real stats, but MyBlogLog's Blog doesn't have 117k readers either.

http://mybloglogb.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/02/2...

Todd Sampson
Co-founder, MyBlogLog

There's a bit more complexity to how the BlogRovR statistics come to be.
When a new user registers and downloads BlogRovR thery're offered bundles of blogs in various areas thet may be interested in, to start them off. Feld Thought's is in the tech bundle, cause we read you and we're always enlightened by your musings.

For those who accept the default bundle EXPLICITLY, they're counted as a subscriber. Now, that is what might happen in google reader as well. But in reader, they might well never return and read his blog. How many feeds in your feedreader to you never actually read? That's a form of "inflated" count as well.

What's really novel and cool about BlogRovR, it's sole reason for existing, is that whenever a RovR user visits any page on the web that Brad has written ABOUT, or the page of some other notable blogger who also is writing about something you, Brad, have written about, they get to see your post immediately, right there! I think this makes them an even more engaged and valid reader than all but the small minority of readers who regularly consume all the content on your site.

So, I don't agree that our stat is "very wrong.". It is certainly a bit "different;" its not exactly comparing apples and oranges, but RSS and similar technologies lead to novel forms of consumption which aren't always readily capture by the simple "subscriber" concept of a newspaper.

Are the wildflowers out yet, Brad? I'm pining for for a long hike out there.

Cheers,
Marc Meyer
CEO, Activeweave BlogRovR

great post. Jean Sini, BlogRovR founder and CTO, here. Aside from the specific aspects of how BlogRovR counts subscribers (and that Marc highlighted above), the general issue you point to is attention, and that's certainly something I find isn't well measured.

I don't know that RovR is any worse an offender than any other reader but, more broadly, I think, like you, that along with page views, subscriber count isn't doing a great job of capturing attention.

Unfortunately, the notion of knowing exactly who's reading you, when, and how (are they scanning your post in half a second, Scoble-style, or getting to enjoy the finer points, deep down in that fourth paragraph?) is very much an elusive one.

This has been said before: we need a better metric (don't we always?); at the same time, getting there might imply a lot of behavior tracking, with all the privacy ramifications. Until then, we're stuck with some form of inflation factor to account for posts going unread in feed readers.

Cheers.

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