What’s more important - site visitors or feed readers?

Posted by stuart as ,

I’ve been ponderig this one quite a lot of late. As I gradually get back into the swing of building my blogs again after the new kidney arrived, I’ve actually found myself getting more excited by feed reader count than actual traffic to this blog.

It’s an interesting quandary, especially when you take into account the technical proficiency of your readers. There’s little doubt that virtually every reader of this blog would be able to sniff out the RSS feed, and add it to their reader. But what if your blog or site was about Rose Gardening. I would imagine that the demographic a site such as this would attract would have little use for a feed reader, and would visit the site directly.

This provides a secondary challenge when trying to monetise a blog about  making money online. Everybody know that AIS’ers are unlikely to click your ads or buy through that affiliate link in your blog, but with the increasing use of feed readers, you’re going to be struggling to even get them to your site in the first place.

I’ve watched the number of feed readers slowly creep closer and closer to the actual number of unique visitors to the site itself here over the last few months. It now stands that the number of feed readers is about a quarter of the number of actual uniques to the site each day, but gaining ground fast.

I wonder at which point we stop producing a blog, and just produce and promote an RSS feed? There is plenty of software out right now which allows you to create just such a feed.

I would imagine that much more inventive ways of monetising feeds need to be found before this is an option. I just don’t think a line of text with a link at the bottom of each post will cut it. Maybe google needs to look at letting us place horizontal text links under the headline of each post?