Do Google's feed statistics include former users?
- by jjackson
I'm currently not using any sort of fancy stat tracking software such as feedburner, but I occasionally look at Google's stats in their Webmaster Tools just to get a rough idea of whether the number of subscribers is going up or down. This only gives the number of users subscribed through Google products, as they explain in their help documents:
Subscriber stats display the number of Google users who have subscribed to your feeds using any Google product (such as Reader, iGoogle, or Orkut). Because users can subscribe to feeds using many different aggregators or RSS readers, the actual number of subscribers to your site may be higher.
I used to use Google Reader very regularly but haven't opened it in a while now. The way I understand it, this will mean that even though I haven't touched any of those feeds in a long time I'm still technically subscribed to them and will therefore be included in Google's statistic.
Is this correct? Also since Google runs Feedburner, does this have any effect on their stats as well?
