How do # RSS feeds compare with # readers?

Jackie,

I'm with you. I subscribe to about 30 RSS feeds, but probably skim a couple every week or so.
Not sure if this is typical or not.

Also a lot of the major blogs come default with Ajax hompages like NetVibes. I am guessing their are a hundreds of thousands of Ajax homepage subscribes that are counted as an RSS subscriber to some of the top blogs that no longer use their Ajax homepage. I know I definitely fall into that category.

Clay

Clay they're not double counted, in face those sorts of subs are undercounted because a service such as Netvibes only pulls the feed once, then cache's it for delivery to multiple readers. You could have 10,000 subs in Netvibes and your counter would read 1. Some do report numbers (and so could Netvibes, not sure so it might not be a good example) but many dont.

Duncan whilst they only pull the feed once, they report to Feedburner how many subscribers they have to that feed.

You write for Techcrunch, so you might be aware that every time Techcrunch writes about a particular service, the number of subscribers to that service is given a boost, even if they go back to reading on a primary reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines.

I don't subscribe to the same argument as Mashable. Many of the subscribers from default packages are real people, and they do stay subscribed, they just don't use that feed reader.
The biggest "default package" is people importing OPML from one reader to another.

As to the original question, I have read a number of reports, notably articles from Yaro Starak on how poor the response rate is for RSS, and that your primary focus should still be email subscribers.

ah - interesting - i never considered that.
i wonder if netvibes/pageflakes etc just count as 1 subscriber... surely not?