Finally! I've seen a lot of people ask for this from Google – and most other feed readers already do it.

<< Does Google Reader report subscriber counts?

Yes, Google Reader reports subscriber counts when we crawl feeds (within the "User-Agent:" header in HTTP). Currently, these counts include users of both Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and over time will include subscriptions from other Google properties. >>

From: http://www.google.com/help/reader/publishers.html

At least this can help give a slightly better indication of how many people are subscribed to your feeds...

Official Google Reader Blog post: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2007/02/one-subscriber-two-subscribers-three.html

finally they make feature that we allhave been asking for qute some time!!

oh point to note, it will only sure up on next morning..so dont be looking all over for it just yet ..

now all I want is a StandardStats website metrics that will will provide me with numerous additional details on my inbound traffic from aggregators within reader itself :)-

I just checked my logs and it's there already...

This value is kinda hidden for many casual users though if it's in the raw logs, and you don't use Feedburner. Wonder if it would make more sense to show this value in Google Webmaster Tools? After all they already allow you to claim a URL?

Might also be natural for *.blogspot.com/atom.xml subscribers to show this value somewhere in the Blogger interface.

Absolutely. Of course, you'd only get the Google Reader related stats but I guess that's better than nothing...

Philipp: Exactly! I've posted a message on their Google Group about the second point specifically. I think it's fair to say that a significant proportion (majority?) of bloggers don't have access to their blogging platform's server logs...

But it's a nice standard on the side... if every RSS reader would do this, typical (server-side) statistic apps could compile good RSS readership numbers. Are there actually other RSS reader clients who already do this, or did Google "invent" something here?

Feedburner's post.

http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/2007/02/the_google_effect.php

Philipp: Bloglines does the same thing – a lot of people requested Reader add it based on what Bloglines does.

I'm pretty sure My Yahoo and Netvibes already do this too. Google are pretty much the last big player to include these stats. (Of course, any standalone feed readers that request their own feeds don't need to do this as they'll request the feed once per user anyway.)

[Edit – I meant Netvibes not Newsgator... although NewsGatorOnline does provide this too.]

I agree with Reto on that....one of earlist web based readers was bloglines and these sub stat's in it were just there..!! I wonder how reader kinda missed out on simple stuff

Cool!
But with blogger... :-(To put this information in Google Webmaster Central should be excellent.
I'm looking for an hack for them who don't have access to logs :-/

Yes, it's pretty common to report subscribers in feeds, and netvibes does, here's its User-Agent string

"Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/; 32 subscribers)"

Yahoo does too:

"YahooFeedSeeker Testing/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide; users 15; views 2759)"

Not just google reader's subscribers , it's also contain "Google Personalized Homepage " , http://www.williamlong.info/archives/798.html .

It seems that Google Reader reaches 30% of the market on English blogs/sites, and about 20% on French blogs/sites (because it is not translated and not promoted)

I doubt that. Probably more than 70% from Google's numbers are people who subscribe to feeds in Google Personalized Homepage.

yeah when I said "Google Reader" I mean "Feedfetcher" ;-)

Weird. I get ..

[IP] – - [20/Feb/2007:00:01:05 +0100] "GET /rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 – blog.outer-court.com "-" "Feedfetcher-Google; (+http: //www.google.com/feedfetcher.html)" "-"

... or this ...

[IP] – - [20/Feb/2007:00:01:25 +0100] "GET /rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 – blog.outer-court.com "-" "Feedfetcher-Google; (+http: //www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 2 subscribers; feed-id=3188550277428677449)" "-"

The first one shows no subscriber information, the second one shows 2 subscribers.

Weird. That can't be right. I know of at least 3 people who have subscribed to your feed using Google Reader ;-) and all the requests to my feeds from "Feedfetcher-Google" contain the subscriber stats (and have done since 2007-02-18 06:49:26 GMT).

I was getting either nothing, 2, or 3 subscribers on my site log, and it seems to bounce around those values randomly. I also subscribe to the Blogoscoped feed on my personalized homepage, so it looks like they've got a bug in the subscriber counts since that's already 4 and I'm sure there's many more subscribers :)

One question (maybe if I say Mihai Parparita, Blog Search would index this page and Google would send an alert to Mihai?): if someone subscribes to a feed in both Reader and IG, Google counts him twice? Or if he subscribes repeatedly to a feed?

Hi Philipp,

We report subscriber counts for all the aliases of the feed that we know of. To find your total number of subscribers, sum up the counts for all distinct feed-ids that appear in your logs (in your example, you have 2 subscribers to that particular feed url, but many more in aggregate). Because of the way our infrastructure is set up, we also do occasional crawls without the subscriber data — you can simply ignore those.

Ionut — if someone subscribes to a feed in both Reader and the Personalized Homepage, that does indeed get counted as two subscriptions. However, a user that repeatedly subscribes to a feed only gets counted once.

Cheers,

-Nick Baum
Product Manager, Google Reader