1 - Duct Tape Marketing - 220,000 (LW - 6)
2 - Church of the Customer - 209,000 (LW - 8)
3 - CopyBlogger - 42,780 (LW - 2)
4 - Search Engine Guide - 12,173 (LW - 4)
5 - Chris Brogan - 8,319 (LW - 3)
6 - Influential Marketing - 6,985 (+12)(LW - 7)
7 - Logic + Emotion - 3,564 (LW - 5)
8 - Converstations - 3,219 (LW - 20)
9 - Drew's Marketing Minute - 3,203 (LW - 15)
10 - The Viral Garden - 3,063 (LW - 25)
11 - Experience Curve - 2,775 (LW - UR)
12 - Conversation Agent - 2,713 (LW - 12)
13 - Techipedia - 2,300 (LW - 13)
14 - The Social Media Marketing Blog - 2,079 (LW - 19)
15 - Emergence Marketing - 1,829 (LW - UR)
16 - The Social Customer Manifesto - 1,672 (LW - UR)
17 - Techno Marketer - 1,367 (LW - 23)
18 - Social Media Explorer - 1,332 (LW - 18)
19 - Movie Marketing Madness - 1,231 (LW - UR)
20 - Daily Fix - 1,111 (LW - 10)
21 - Customers Rock! - 849 (LW - UR)
22 - Shotgun Marketing - 721 (LW - UR)
23 - Biz Solutions Plus - 541 (LW - UR)
24 - Resonance Partnership Blog - 301 (LW - UR)
25 - MediaPhyter - 116 (LW - UR)
The Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs are ranked according to the number of subscribers, according to FeedBurner. The number you see after the blog name is how many subscribers accessed the blog's feed, according to FeedBurner. FeedBurner (and I had to look it up to make sure) tracks the number of times your blog's feed is accessed, and matches it against the IP address of the computer making the request, to approximate the number of subscribers that access your feed, and report this as the number used in the Top 25. After that number is a positive or negative number, and this represents how many readers the blog gained or lost from last week's Top 25. The final stat tells you what position the blog held in the Top 25 Last Week (LW). If you see this; (LW - UR), it means the blog wasn't ranked last week.
As of this week, the Top 25 Marketing and Social Media blogs are now being measured according to FeedBurner's count of daily subscribers. FeedBurner tracks the number of times your blog's feed is accessed on a daily basis by subscribers, and blogs can post this number on their blogs. The ones that do, are considered for inclusion in the Top 25.
As when the Top 25 moved from Alexa to Technorati as its measuring stick, this week's countdown sees a LOT of shuffling. First, several blogs were dropped from the Top 25 because they don't report their FeedBurner subscriber number on their blog. This included Seth's Blog, Six Pixels of Separation, Brand Autopsy, Jaffe Juice, Damn! I Wish..., Diva Marketing, Every Dot Connects, What's Next, and Greg Verdino's Marketing Blog. I'm pretty sure that many if not all of these blogs would make the Top 25 ranked on Feedburner subscribers, so if any of you add the FB chicklet to your blog, let me know either via a comment here, or shoot me an email, and I'll be happy to add your blog back to the list. If you want to do this, from the dashboard of your Feedburner account, click Publicize, then Feed Count.
So this also means that there's several new faces on the board. These include Experience Curve, Emergence Marketing, The Social Customer Manifesto, Movie Marketing Madness, Customers Rock!, Shotgun Marketing, Biz Solutions Plus, Resonance Partnership Blog, and MediaPhyter.
Remember if you want to have your blog be considered for inclusion in the Top 25, make sure you add the Feedburner feed count chicklet to your blog.
Next update is next Wednesday.
32 comments:
Very useful info here! Thanks!
Happened to stumble upon this blog :)
Hey Mack,
I'm sure there are many others who have more FB subscribers than my blog, but with my number hovering between 1250 and 1300, I could at least be on the list for a day or so before others knock me off again. :-)
This is a very interesting way of measuring ... and has certainly shaken up the top 25 -- at least for a week or so.
I don't actually publish subscriber numbers though don't have a particular reason why. Maybe I will blog about it and see what my readers think. What are the pros and cons?
Hey Mack, good to see you move away from Technorati with this, but don't think using FB is the right choice honestly as you will only capture blogs that are actually publishing to feedburner. You can use Bloglines or Google Reader to get some count for every blog you want though so why not use these. Peter Kim once made a calculation of how feedburner data related to Bloglines for instance (that was for his M20 list). Just a thought, great to see you keep up with it after all this time though ;)
"Hey Mack,
I'm sure there are many others who have more FB subscribers than my blog, but with my number hovering between 1250 and 1300, I could at least be on the list for a day or so before others knock me off again. :-)"
Add the chicklet and I'll be happy to add you Nedra, that number should have Spare Change firmly entrenched in the Top 25!
"I don't actually publish subscriber numbers though don't have a particular reason why. Maybe I will blog about it and see what my readers think. What are the pros and cons?"
Skellie at SkellieWag had an interesting post several months ago about how visitors perceive a blog. Skellie claimed that if a visitors comes to a blog and sees that every post has multiple comments, and that there are hundreds or thousands of subscribers, that the blog and its content must be 'popular'. I would say there is some truth to that. So if you've got it, flaunt it! I think many of us marketers are horrible at self-promotion, and I am the poster child for this!
It's already there, Mack, on the right sidebar. :-)
"Hey Mack, good to see you move away from Technorati with this, but don't think using FB is the right choice honestly as you will only capture blogs that are actually publishing to feedburner. You can use Bloglines or Google Reader to get some count for every blog you want though so why not use these."
Kris here's the problem I have. Go to Bloglines and try to subscribe to this blog's URL. Look at how many different feeds you can subscribe to. How do I determine which feed I should use?
But with Feedburner, it's closer to apples to apples.
Now having said that, if Technorati comes out tomorrow and announces that they are going to begin adding links from Twitter/Plurk/MySpace and other social sites, then I would seriously consider switching back, if they appeared to be giving accurate results.
The problem I have always said with any site, be it Alexa, Technorati or Feedburner, is that it never seems to be picking the one that gets it right, but the measurement tool that is 'least wrong'.
Nedra I'm so sorry. I actually visited your blog earlier to check and see if you had it, and the blog took so long to load (remember I am on dial-up), that I thought it was done when apparently it wasn't. I didn't even see a right sidebar come up. Sorry! I'll definitely put Spare Change in next week's list!
Kris, Feedburner is the best way to measure subscribers to a blog and here's why: Feedburner counts subscribers from ALL feed readers, including Bloglines, Google Reader, BlogRovR, etc.
If you just look at Bloglines subscribers, you are only counting a subset of readers for a blog. For us, Bloglines only makes up about 10% of our subscribers.
BTW, kudos Mack on making the switch. And I'm not just saying that 'cause we moved up the list : )
Hey Mack - Busy week for me, so I didn't have the chance to add the chicklet until today. I've added it now - it'll be interesting to see how the list shapes up (shakes up?) over the coming weeks as more and more people jockey for position.
But Seth isn't a 'top marketing blog' because he doesn't publish sub numbers? I know man - rules are rules, but really? :-)
G
"But Seth isn't a 'top marketing blog' because he doesn't publish sub numbers? I know man - rules are rules, but really? :-)"
Obviously my bias against bald bloggers is showing itself again ;)
Again, it's a matter of the lesser of two evils. Do I stick with Technorati, which isn't tracking links from non-blogs (despite the fact that ppl in general seem to be linking more on these sites), or do I go with Feedburner, and not include several top bloggers?
I think FB has a more accurate tracking method, and it's opt-in. Any excluded blogger can be considered by taking 2 mins (that's all it takes, promise) to add the appropriate code to their blog.
Hopefully Seth can join in the fun, surely he must have secretaries for this type of manual labor? ;)
A ha! I knew it was the bald thing!
As an aside, I'm not so sure that Technorati's big problem lies in not tracking non-blogs (I figure you mostly mean presence apps, etc.) It's a factor for sure, but beyond that there's no doubt that their their engine quite simply isn't running any more. The old links drop, the new never get counted (even when they do come from blogs.) Oh well...
"As an aside, I'm not so sure that Technorati's big problem lies in not tracking non-blogs (I figure you mostly mean presence apps, etc.) It's a factor for sure, but beyond that there's no doubt that their their engine quite simply isn't running any more. The old links drop, the new never get counted (even when they do come from blogs.) Oh well.."
I can only speak for myself and others I have talked to, but here's what I think is happening.
I think the drop in the number of links is more about a change in linking behavior that Technorati isn't tracking. For example, my #3 and #4 sources of traffic currently are Twitter and Plurk. This traffic is almost completely coming via links to my blog from these sites. And Technorati is totally missing all of it.
And from my own end, I probably leave 10X the number of links to blogs and posts on Twitter, as I do here. It's just so much easier to do it on Twitter or Plurk than it is to crank out a blog post.
And also, I've always tried to view the Top 25 as a resource for my readers. I wanted it to be helpful to the people that are thinking 'ok I have no idea what the best marketing and social media blogs are, where should I start?' The Top 25 can hopefully be a good starting point for these people.
But when they come and see that almost all of the blogs are losing links every week (according to Technorati), it's easy for them to think that the entire blogosphere is collapsing, when instead linking behavior is simply changing.
Whoa! I made the list! Never thought I'd see that happen. :)
Welp, only 212,000 to catch up to the duct tape guys. Start digging in, baby. : )
Hey Jackie, I realize that FB counts all RSS readers but still thinks since it doesn't capture all blogs that that is a bit of a trade off. That's why suggesting to take the stats of one RSS reader and to go from there. Here's how Peter used the Feedburner/Bloglines combination for his M20 a while ago: http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2007/08/the-m20-top-mar.html
Hmmm....quite the interesting shift in methodology here my friend and one that I whole-heartedly agree with, though like Jackie that's not just because MMM all of a sudden shot up on the list.
I've long contended that RSS subscribers are an under-valued metric and FeedBurner is obviously the most universal tool to measure that.
Considering all the other problems T'rati is having, this was a good call.
Here is a cool little tool you might find useful.
It allows you to check people's subscribers, even if they don't publicly show them. Just enter the RSS URL. Although, it only works for certain people and I'm not sure why that is. But you never know.
"Hey Jackie, I realize that FB counts all RSS readers but still thinks since it doesn't capture all blogs that that is a bit of a trade off. That's why suggesting to take the stats of one RSS reader and to go from there. Here's how Peter used the Feedburner/Bloglines combination for his M20 a while ago: http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2007/08/the-m20-top-mar.html"
Kris, Pete said he was using FB stats for those that make them public, and assuming that 20% of blogger's subscribers using Bloglines. I think that percentage is way too high. As Jackie said, only 10% of her subscribers use Bloglines. Currently, only 13% of mine use Bloglines, and that percentage has been falling for over a year. Other bloggers that I've talked to have also told me that Bloglines is an increasingly smaller piece of their subscriber pie.
Hey Mack ... I would also suggest taking a look at http://howsociable.com/
Zac, there are workarounds to get the FB stats for most bloggers, including Seth. But I don't want to post numbers unless they are available for the public to see.
Gavin, thanks for pointing out How Sociable. I played with it the other day a bit, and while it's interesting, I couldn't understand how it arrived at some of its results for me. Some social sites that I am active on, it gave me a zero, and other sites that I never use, it gave me high scores.
And again, the intended audience for the Top 25 are people that are new to blogging and looking for a resource to point them in the right direction of the 'top' marketing and social media blogs. No ranking or list will be perfect, so the aim is to get these readers up to speed on quickly on the ones they will likely get the most 'bang' for their buck from.
Which is why I don't want to use an elaborate system for ranking the list, and prefer to use one metric. Many people that would benefit the most from this list, have likely never heard of Feedburner, and throwing in 2-3 other measuring tools would only confuse the issue completely for them.
However, I do think How Sociable could be an interesting tool for us early adopters that have actually heard of all the tools and sites that it measures ;)
Oops! I forgot to add the widget to our blog. Got that fixed now. Wasn't even sure it would put EDC in the Top 25, but I think we can hang in there somewhere close to the bottom. :-)
I'm glad you changed the way you're measuring it, even if it drops us off the list. (We just need to be more effective in asking for subscribers; something I rarely do.) As we've discussed a number of times, I lost confidence in the Technorati rankings ages ago, and FB seems as good a method as any right now, without forcing you to make some kind of qualitative judgment.
The Top 25 is a valuable resource for new bloggers and people just checking out the social media / marketing world online. Thanks for making the info available.
I am thrilled to be back on the list again, even if only for one week! :)
This reminds me of how we view customers in a business. We focus so much on measures like market share and popularity that we forget to focus on what may be our most important asset: our existing customers.
In a blog's case, our existing customers are our feed subscribers.
Thanks, Mack, for helping us think about that focus!
Did you change your list's metric (Technorati to Feedburner) because you were in danger of falling off your own list?
'Anonymous' asks:
"Did you change your list's metric (Technorati to Feedburner) because you were in danger of falling off your own list?"
Normally I would delete this simply because you weren't willing to sign your name to your comment. But some people might be wondering the same thing, so I'll do my best to answer.
First, the original Top 25 list appeared in April of 2006. I didn't make my own list until several weeks later.
Second, when I switched from Alexa to Technorati as the metric of choice, The Viral Garden actually FELL several spots in the ranking. So if this was all about making my blog look good, I would have never gone to Technorati to begin with.
Third, my Feedburner subscribers have been steadily increasing since Day One. If I was simply wanting to use the list as a tool to prop up my own blog, I would have picked Feedburner as the metric from the get go.
And if I really was using the Top 25 as a tool to prop up my own blog, I probably would have deleted your comment as soon as I saw it. But I will say this, if you want to leave another, you'll have to be willing to sign your own name to your thoughts. That was your one freebie.
Mack, I agree the 20% might be too high, I honestly wouldn't know. The percentage was also less of a matter to me. Anyway whatever the metric you use to pull this list, as I told you in NYC I think the list is a perfect starting point for many to find out about smart people talking about marketing and that doesn't change. I just wouldn't have used FB stats for the reasons mentioned before, that's all.
Hmph. Was going to ask for a recount, but I just counted the number of folks adding the chicklet, etc and it looks like I'm still not going to make the list. Humbug.
Seriously though Mack, one fair way might be to pick a search engine, and use the link: approach. I'm not sure how reliable that is either, though.
eg. "link:http://telltenfriends.com" as a Google search.
I just tested it, and it's actually better on Yahoo, oddly enough: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com
Same protocol (link:http://url.com) but select "Entire Site" in the dropdown.
It would be difficult to quantify the Viral Garden though, since there are links shared between the .blogspot address and .com, etc. So it's still flawed.
Hey Mack,
Well I am definitely honored to make the list even if just for a week...and especially in light of the fact that I changed my blog theme just this week and my coder added THAT particular Feedburner widget which I hadn't used before... plus in July there was some sort of feed misdirect and Feedburner was showing "0" feeds which are slowly adding back.
So, thanks so much for including my blog!
Marianne
Mack,
I like your new way to analyze blogs. Not because I am on it but subscribers say so much more than links.
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