Should you display your RSS feeds counter on your blog?

Mar 04, 2008

This is the question dosh dosh is pondering over on his blog (he has the feeds counter displayed on his blog by the way). Why do people put their RSS feeds counter on the blogs? Is it to show off how many RSS subscribers your blog has? I don’t see anything wrong in such kind of show off.

Maki (he publishes dosh dosh) argues that he doesn’t want people to subscribe to his RSS feeds just because he has high number of RSS subscribers. I think displaying your RSS feeds counter makes good sense because it shows your visitors, especially the new visitors, how many people trust the content on your blog. Even initially if they subscribe to your RSS feeds just because they’re impressed by the number they will end up reading your posts eventually and I think this is good, isn’t it? You’re not misleading them; you are just trying to make sure they don’t miss the updates on your blog.

Blogging, written, textual blogging, is all about readership. The more readers you have the more successful your blog becomes, and the more successful your blog becomes, the better content (ideally) you want to present on your blog, the better the content on your blog, the greater is your readership. So it all becomes a cycle, and displaying your RSS feeds counter is just a small part in this whole entire big affair. Whether we like it or not there are a few people who are driven by numbers. There is nothing wrong in prompting them to subscribe because if they don’t like your content they will simply unsubscribe. So there is no harm putting your RSS feeds counter on your blog. What do you think?

Side note: instead of leaving comments on other blogs I have decided to create short blog posts on my blog with links to the posts I intended to leave comment on. This way I will be able to generate more content for this blog as well as send trackbacks to other blogs. Also I feel freer expressing my thoughts on my own blog rather than posting one-liners on other blogs. I won’t be doing it all the time but most of the time I will. Some blogs don’t publish trackbacks but still personally this seems to be a better idea.