How long can a blog last without posts before the number of RSS subscribers decreases?

The amount of comments a blog has can give you some indication to the success of the site as can the traffic the site receives but neither are completely reliable or fair ways of comparing blogs in my opinion. For example, TechCrunch currently has a mind boggling 875,000 subscribers yet some posts have received less than 10 comments. Compare that to some blogs out there with only a few hundred subscribers but manage to get 20-50 comments in each post.

RSS is King

Without doubt, the number of subscribers a blog has is the best way to gauge how successful the blog is. This is one of the reasons why there are so many guides showing you how you can increase the number of subscribers to your blog. Put simply, a blog with a high feed count is successful. Some blog genres find it easier to get subscribers than others so it’s debatable what qualifies as a ‘high feed count’ but from my experience blogs with 10 thousand subscribers or more tend to be regarded as leaders in their niche.

The RSS Roller Coaster

There are thousands of articles online which talk about how to increase your RSS feed count. These articles explain how you can encourage, persuade and sometimes even bribe your visitors into subscribing to your blog feed.

However, I have not seen too many articles which discuss the unsubscribing habits of feed readers ie. what makes someone unsubscribe from a feed?

I’m sure there are dozens of reasons why someone unsubscribes from a blog including :

• You have stopped updating the blog
• The reader does not read your blog anymore ie. change of reading habits
• The reader does not need your blog anymore (for example, a blog aimed at beginners may lose some subscribers once they learn more)
• You have offended them

The first point brings me to the question I want to ask you all :

‘How long can a blog last without posts before the number of RSS subscribers decreases?’

Gone but not forgotten

The reason I am curious about this subject is because I have witnessed many popular blogs drastically reduce their posting frequency and yet they do not appear to have lost any of their subscribers. For example, the blogging advice blog John TP has not been updated in a month and a half and yet the site retains it’s 3,100 daily subscribers. Likewise, the popular blog Pearsonified didn’t update for over 2 months and didn’t lose any of it’s 4,800 subscribers.

I have no doubt that drastically reducing the frequency of posting will lose you subscribers. Lower traffic blogs should see a reduction in subscribers after a few weeks of posting but popular blogs seem to retain the same feedcount. Why is this? Well, I have no cold hard facts however I believe that they are still losing some subscribers but that they are gaining new ones from search engine and referral traffic, despite the fact that the blog is not updated as often.

One other big factor is influence. The more popular and influential a blog is the less inclined people are to unsubscribe from them. I know this from experience, I still subscribe to a few blogs which are not updated much now because when they do post the articles are good (sometimes newsbreaking).

However, this begs the question once again, ‘how long can a blog last without posts before the number of RSS subscribers decreases?’. If John Chow, Darren Rowse, Brian Clark or Daniel Scocco decided to stop updating their blogs, how many months would pass before their RSS feed counts decreased?

Overview

It’s clear to me that many RSS readers do not check the feeds they subscribe to often enough to remove them from their reader. I’ve seen many bloggers claim to subscribe to hundreds of blogs so this is understandable ie. the more blogs you subscribe too the more time consuming it is to manage those feeds in your reader.

I also believe that there are many people who rarely remove a blog from their feed reader and that they are happy to simply move the ones which are updated less to the bottom of the pile.

What makes you unsubscribe from a blog? How long would you be willing to subscribe to a blog if they stopped updating it?

Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes Club
Posted on May 6th, 2008 and filed under Blogging
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