Marco.org

In the wake of Google Reader’s shutdown, I rewrote my feed-stats script to be more accurate and produce more relevant output formatting.

I was happily surprised to see the top stats for my site:

Google Reader’s crawlers are still running, but as far as I know, nobody’s seeing the results, so they don’t really count.

Feedly does not yet report subscribers in its User-Agent string, but were receptive to the idea when I suggested it by email. They queried one of the database segments and reported that my current subscriber count is over 16,000. Given that they appear elsewhere to be the most popular new service, and they’re one of the few free options, this number is plausible relative to the paid alternatives.

Feedbin and The Old Reader both plan to add subscriber reporting soon, and gave me my subscriber count by email.

In addition to those, AOL Reader and Digg Reader currently do not report subscribers. Please help me pressure them to add a subscriber count to their User-Agent strings¹ — it’s important for publishers to know how many people are invisibly subscribed behind one-to-many crawlers like these.

Anyway, total reported subscribers are split almost equally between Google Reader and non-Google-Reader options:

I can’t reliably compare site traffic since I published an extremely popular post just one day after Google Reader’s interface and API were shut down, but so far, it doesn’t appear that site traffic is noticeably down.

Attention to the feed also appears healthy: this week’s sponsorship post generated a strong number of responses and may have been partly responsible for overloading the sponsor’s site shortly after it was published.

It’s still a little early to say for sure, but so far, it looks like most of this site’s former Google Reader subscribers have found alternatives and remained subscribers.

I’d love to hear from others: How have your subscribers fared?