Official News blogs - Bloglines subscriber numbers and OPML file
Yesterday I was writing about the newly launched Media Standards Trust site, and the excellent blog roll of blogging journalists they had on their site, which I have made an OPML file for.
The same page had an equally useful blog roll of 'official' blogs from major news sources in the UK, including the BBC, Sky, Channel 4 and The Guardian. Again, I thought an OMPL file listing all the RSS feeds of these sites might be of use.
I also took the time to look at the subscriber numbers for these feeds in Bloglines.
Here the BBC is leading the way, with 211 subscribers to The Editors Blog, and 267 for Nick Robinson's Newslog. Next in the pack came two feeds from The Guardian - Roy Greenslade's blog, and the Organ Grinder RSS feed.
The Telegraph's Shane Richmond came in fifth, with 55 subscribers to his often provocative and entertaining news technology blog.
| Number of Bloglines subscribers | |
| Nick Robinson's Newslog | 267 |
| BBC Editors Blog | 211 |
| Roy Greenslade | 112 |
| Guardian Organ Grinder | 104 |
| Shane Richmond's Telegraph Technology Blog | 55 |
| BBC Magazine Monitor | 39 (plus around 60 subscriptions to various sub-sets of the content) |
| Fleet Street 2.0 | 34 |
| Adam Boulton | 16 |
| Channel 4 Newsroom | 10 |
| Press Gazette Editors blog | No Bloglines subscribers |
| Sky News Editors blog | No Bloglines subscribers |
Bloglines reported very low subscriber figures for the output of Channel 4 and Sky. Only 10 bloglines users regularly get content from the Channel 4 newsroom, and I was apparently the first person to use the service to subscribe to the Sky News editors blog.
I couldn't help but wonder if I was using a less popular address for the feeds, or if Bloglines was behaving strangely on the day I looked at the figures? Of course, it could also be more anecdotal evidence that the Bloglines user demographic is heavily weighted towards consumers of the BBC and The Guardian and away from other media sources.
Hi Martin,
*Very* interesting post, and I might build some of these feeds into my journalism feed. Thanks!
And, a request: I'm working on a similar survey for PR companies, based on this methodology. However, I must be missing a trick here - how *do* you get Bloglines subscriber numbers? I've located the directory of public feeds but it doesn't seem searchable. Can you help me out here?
Regards
Friendly Ghost
There are two places Bloglines displays the numbers. When you read a feed it should appear next to the 'related feeds / mark all new / unsubscribe / edit subscription' options.
However, that only shows the number of subscribers for the version of the feed that you are subscribed to.
To get a better picutre, when you go to subscribe to a site, enter the URL of the site into the Blogline add URL field. It will then show you all the feeds and variations on the feeds available from that page - with subscriber numbers. You need to add them up to get the total number