• by dave.b , Max Kalehoff , July 13, 2007

Last week Google's recently acquired Feedburner, one of the leaders in RSS syndication and a darling of the blogosphere, quietly announced it would begin offering a number of premium services for free. The Feedburner blog proudly touted: "One of the many benefits that FeedBurner publishers will enjoy now that FeedBurner is part of the Google family is a little something we like to call, 'more for free!'.... We suspect this will be welcome news to the 450,000+ of you using many of our other free services."

While the savviest bloggers have for years tapped into Feedburner's free services to identify and tout their volume of RSS subscribers -- a simultaneous addiction and badge of accomplishment -- they now can freely tap into Feedburner's new "Reach" metric. Reach, according to Feedburner, is the total number of people who have actually taken action -- viewed or clicked -- on the content in a feed. It's similar to the difference between knowing how many subscribers a magazine has, and then how many people actually pull it out of the recycling bin and read or interact with it. Quite important!

Venture capitalist and blogger Fred Wilson explained: "A large number of [readers] put my feed into a reader at some point but never read it. There's no reason to remove it and so it gets counted every day by FeedBurner. The bottom line is the subs number in feeds... is useful at the very start of a new blog... But after a short while it becomes meaningless."

As for the blogosphere, anecdotal reports suggest people are thrilled to have this reach metric added onto the free Feedburner service. If anything, this offering has served as a good loyalty strategy for Google in maintaining strong relationships with this decidedly influential and potentially profitable stakeholder group. At the same time, many bloggers are speculating this is another step in an inevitable integration of the Google AdWords and AdSense platforms into the Feedburner ad network.

But there have been other important reactions among bloggers regarding the actual reported reach stats. While many of their daily subscribers have steadily climbed -- for some, into the tens of thousands -- reach figures tend to decline over time, and typically end up representing a fraction of their total subscriber base. Fred Wilson reports that at one point, his daily reach was 50% of subscribers, then it was 25%, and now it's less than 10%. Matt Hurst of Data Mining reports reach of approximately 10%. The highest I've seen reported is around 30% and the lowest around 1%. My daily blog reach is approximately 11%.

What does this open questioning mean? While the large discrepancy between subscriber and actual reach figures is initially startling and perhaps a little ego-bruising, Feedburner's free release of the reach stat is advancing the important debate about what sorts of metrics really matter. To be sure, the reach stat is still somewhat ambiguous, but its newfound exposure is elevating new dimensions about reader behaviors around blogs, micromedia and syndicated content in general.

For all the self-conscious bloggers addicted to their site and reader analytics -- including those seeking to monetize through advertising -- reach is sure to become one of the more scrutinized metrics. It will drive greater attention to content interaction and surely prompt new questions around media and advertising engagement.

What do you think?