Looking at my Netvibes and Google Reader accounts there are a lot of feeds that I subscribed to months or even years ago that I never ever read. These are feeds from popular sites that have thousands of readers and yet I’m no longer interested in the subject matter enough to read them.
The reason is normally that the feed was related to a project or client a few months ago or that the blog produced a few good posts but has since gone downhill.
Although these feeds will stay unread they are still going to stay in my feed reader. Why? Because I’m too lazy to remove them. The same principle applies to feed readers as offline magazine and gym subscriptions – people are just too lazy to cancel them. At least with feeds you don’t have to pay for them and you never know when you might need them.
Whenever I get a link from somewhere like Engadget or TechCrunch and receive about 500 uniques from their half million + subscriber base it always makes me wonder how many of their readers actually open the feed at least once a week.
Some new blogs seem to have only a couple of thousand readers but hundreds of active commenters and it makes me wonder how many larger blogs have thousands of uninterested subscribers.
Maybe every blog should be forced to ask readers to confirm their subscriptions once in a while to let new blogs catch up? 
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I have a hard time removing feeds from my reader as well, but with a new blog my subscriptions seem to fluctuate greatly but can’t seem to get a good base going yet.
As for me, once a feed is in my reader it would really have to irritate the heck out of me to remove it.
I don’t have any problem removing unread or unwanted feeds. Having all those unread numbers going up and up really stresses me out so if a blog doesn’t deliver any value I’ll unsubscribe in an instant. Well perhaps not an instant, but you get the idea!
I also think that smaller blogs lend themselves more to discussion. People are more comfortable commenting on a small site, where they recognize the other commenters and can interact with the author. On big sites it feels pointless and unpersonal.
You have provided me with some useful information and has a new blogger I will take heed.
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