The state of the feed world

I’ve had Feedburner on the mind recently (my last post was on the company as well).  I’m on my way back from our first post investment board meeting in Chicago as I type this and I had a chance to spend yesterday afternoon playing around with their system (read: see how many hits and how many subscribers are being served to various sites that have burned their feed).  Lots of interesting data there.  Feedburner is preparing a post on this, so I won’t steal their thunder, but I will share three data points that struck me:  First, the number of subscribers to the largest feeds is pretty amazing – the top sites have literally hundreds of thousands of subscribers.  Second, the growth of podcasts is pretty amazing – there were no podcasts in the top 15 a few months ago; now there are several.  Finally, there are now few porn blogs that are starting to climb the list (I guess that was to be expected, although I was hoping the feed world would stay a little more pure than that).  Interestingly based on their hits vs. subscriber ratios, it appears that these sites are having their  contentscraped a lot vs. actually having subscribers to their feeds.

I’ll post a link to the Feedburner post when it goes up – it will be full of interesting data on the growth and popularity of feeds.