VentureBlog hits 50,000 Subscribers: Without RSS There Would Be No VentureBlog

When I started writing VentureBlog four years ago, I posted a lot. There was no one else writing about the venture industry and I had a bunch to say. But over the last few years, lots of other great voices have emerged to discuss venture capital and entrepreneurship. And rather than write for the sake of writing, I only post when there is something that strikes me as significant. As a result, my posting has been, shall we say, less frequent.

If people had to go to VentureBlog.com to find out if I had written something new, it would no doubt be a pretty frustrating experience. But thanks to the glory of RSS, people who are interested in venture capital or entrepreneurship can simply subscribe to my RSS feed and be notified when I finally get around to posting something new. Do I think that it is worth subscribing to the VentureBlog RSS Feed? You bet. Do I think it would be worth checking VentureBlog.com every day for new content? Not likely. Which is precisely why I've been singing the praises of RSS since I started reading and writing blogs. It is an incredible efficiency tool and I only wish that every single web service out there had an RSS feed of its own.

I suppose that I am most grateful to RSS because it has allowed me to continue to serve an audience of interested readers without having to create content for content's sake. For all of you readers I am eternally grateful. It has been gratifying to watch my RSS subscriber numbers grow over the years despite the frequency of my posts declining. And I am thrilled to report that as of today VentureBlog has over 50,000 RSS subscribers. That is pretty exciting. So thank you all.

I have always enjoyed when Fred Wilson posts stats about his blog readership. It is definitely interesting stuff. In fact, I think that Fred, Brad and many of my other fellow VC bloggers, write blogs in part because they are interested in better understanding social media. That has certainly been a very pleasant byproduct of VentureBlog. So I thought I would share with you the data I receive from FeedBurner today about my RSS subscribers. While Bloglines and NewsGator remain the largest feed readers out there, it has been interesting to watch Google, Netvibes and Firefox growing. And it is particularly interesting to see what a big chunk of VentureBlog's traffic comes from Rojo -- no doubt the result of being part of a Rojo VC Feed (along with Fred, Brad, Jurvetson, Allan Morgan and others).

Thanks again to all of you who are subscribers. I truly appreciate it. And I will try hard to make it worth your while every time you click on that VentureBlog link in your news reader.

Comments

[Lateef]

Congrats on reaching 50k.

[Baris Karadogan]

David,
50K is an amazing number. You may want to think of monetization. Fred Wilson appears to be 1/8th your size and does $30K per year in revenue :-)

[Mika]

If you think RSS is good, you might try email notification. While savvy people know how to use RSS, a huge number of the population have no idea what it is. Others just prefer to get an email instead.

I've noticed on my sites that the majority of the subscriptions that grow are via email, and it has made a huge impact on the growth, well more than RSS has.

Free option: Feedburner - it's quite simple to set up.

Cheap option: Feedblitz - set it up inside feedburner and you can get stats on number of users. For $5/mo you can customize the email, a feature lacking in feedburner.

[sherry Borzo]

I only started blogging about six months ago and I get overwhelmed at the thought of daily blogging and often trying to read those who blog daily. Even though I know RSS is still not used by a lot of people I think it is a great tool that will eventually catch on. Congrats on your success and on proving that blogging when you have content can still yield success in building an audience.

[sherry Borzo]

I only started blogging about six months ago and I get overwhelmed at the thought of daily blogging and often trying to read those who blog daily. Even though I know RSS is still not used by a lot of people I think it is a great tool that will eventually catch on. Congrats on your success and on proving that blogging when you have content can still yield success in building an audience.