A Look at ChurchCrunch Stats: RSS Feedburner Growth
As you can see from above, last year ChurchCrunch started with about 280 subscribers who were reading daily. I can actually remember taking a look at this particular statistic around that time and telling myself that my hairy goal of making 1,000 by the end of the 1st anniversary was going to be a tight squeeze.
Apparently, my concern didn’t last too long as this past May we broke 1,000 RSS Subscribers.
At the same time I also created a new goal of breaking the 2k barrier before the end of that years as well. 3 months later we managed to meet that goal of 2,000 RSS Readers.
Sweet.
Although I may not have been explicit, I thought that it would be an insane goal of getting 3,000 by the end of the calendar year. As you may already know, we weren’t able to convert. Our top line reading was about 2,834 I believe. I captured a screen the day after that mark:
All good, right? I’m not at all worried or upset about not making my goals; I think it’s a healthy practice of failing!
From here on out I can’t imagine that I’m going to spend much time on this particular metric in terms of goals (although I definitely have some for 2010!) and I think there will be a number of factors that may impact it anyways (more to be known soon!).
How has your year been in 2009 for RSS growth? What have you learned?
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Open Thread: Pets in the Office? 
As a side note from a user (and subscriber) of your site – unless I have a comment to contribute, I almost always get your content from my RSS feed, meaning I don't end up visiting your site…
If you're RSS Feeds have achieved more than you were expecting, but your page visits have not, that could be more than coincidence…
Just a thought.
Happy New Year!
that's great! it's not an issue of a \”if, then\” but rather a point of \”both, and\”.
I think…
It is weird because I have daily readers but not a lot of rss subscribers (50 in all). Most of those come from friendfeed.com
I do not know if that is because people just do not use an RSS Reader or what, but I wish i had more. But I am more interested in stats then feed subscribers I guess.
friend feed gives you rss readers. look at your feedburner stats. you need \”pure\” feeds.
I am confused, but i think you are saying that i need true pure feeds, not friend feed readers
yes.
2009 was a fantastic year for RSS growth. Page views and visitors haven't grown at the same rate as RSS growth though. I saw almost 400% growth in RSS readership. I've done a few things to help… I added a huge rss button to make it easier for people to subscribe and I create a welcome page for anyone who comments for the first time where they can subscribe easily.
But, when I saw the greatest growth, it was always accompanied with strong content that many people were engaging with and when I was posting at least 2 if not 3 times a day. Since the summer my RSS growth has just hovered in the mid-300's but I'd gotten down to only 3-4 posts a week. I'm pushing to hit 500 in April, which means pushing a lot of content, especially content that engages.
wow, congrats! you're cooking!
I have a question: why not continue to push for RSS subscriptions?
Also, on my newer blog (the one in the link), I'm about to roll out a separate newsletter. For me, RSS and email subscriptions and then the accompanying email newsletter have been my biggest metrics in terms of what I focus on tracking (rather than on site stats). I'm curious in why you're not as interested in your subscribers as your on site stats. (By the way, I don't mean that you're not interested in the people who subscribe – I just mean it from a stats stand point.)
-Marshall Jones Jr.
push for both!