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ShoeMoney vs John Chow the real winner

by Patrick Altoft on November 1, 2007

Shoemoney has beaten John Chow in the first ever “How many of my subscribers can I get to read my blog twice” contest by getting 4,400 readers on the last day.

People are speculating that Shoemoney was using fake figures all month but looking at the cached versions of his page in Google that wasn’t the case. Another tactic might have been having a seperate feed just for email users and redirecting it on the last day but again Google cache rules this out.

Looking at the data below it seems that while Shoemoney has more subscribers the “reach” metric (showing the number of people who either read the feed or clicked through to the blog post) is almost the same as Johns.

Shoemoney
Date Circulation Hits Reach
25th Oct 12770 28102 2379
26th Oct 12779 27573 2166
27th Oct 12708 25391 1800
28th Oct 12740 24877 1833
29th Oct 13600 29150 2270
30th Oct 18003 29729 2348
 
John Chow
Date Circulation Hits Reach
25th Oct 13061 28125 2369
26th Oct 13058 28216 2418
27th Oct 12799 24715 1884
28th Oct 12887 24601 1942
29th Oct 13317 29349 2494
30th Oct 13276 28202 2374

Septembers data

Just for fun lets look back at the same data for September to see who has really won the contest.

Shoemoney
Date Circulation Hits Reach
25th Sept 11012 25342 1904
26th Sept 11105 24571 2008
27th Sept 11122 24666 1404
28th Sept 10999 21381 1211
29th Sept 10762 20805 922
30th Sept 10833 21908 1232
 
John Chow
Date Circulation Hits Reach
25th Sept 8508 24960 377
26th Sept 8455 23839 391
27th Sept 8817 26090 414
28th Sept 8688 22477 293
29th Sept 8410 21902 359
30th Sept 8585 23067 253

From this data it seems that although Shoemoney has gained the most subscribers John Chow has had a ten-fold increase in the number of people who actually read his feed. I know which one I’d rather have.

Back in 1999 web developers used to be able to double the number of hits a site was getting by just adding a few 1 pixel clear gif images to every page. Management saw that hits were up and everybody was happy. Then, a couple of years later, people started to track unique visitors and suddenly hits didn’t matter any more. Should subscribers go the same way as hits or is Shoemoney a worthy winner?

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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }

Al 01 Nov 2007 at 3:14 pm

Interesting find, where did you get the reach figure from?

I’m looking forward to hear from Shoe what he did on that final day, I just can’t see what he did publicly making that big a difference.

Al 01 Nov 2007 at 3:26 pm

A quick suggestion for you, a subscribe to comments tick box would be good Smile

Patrick Altoft 01 Nov 2007 at 3:55 pm

I used the Feedburner API, luckily they both have stats enabled and public.

I don’t run WP so a subscribe to comments might be tricky, I’ll get coding.

Kacper 01 Nov 2007 at 5:34 pm

Interesting. Right now they both get even more, because of the whole buzz around the result of competition.
Amazing Smile

Mubin 01 Nov 2007 at 5:35 pm

The real winner is the winner that won the competition and that is Shoemoney. John Chow has a tendency to use flashy titles to get readers to click through, much like he is gaming blogrush to only show the best headlines instead of his normal ones.

What would you call it?

Sander 01 Nov 2007 at 9:03 pm

Joost de Valk made a nice graphic interface to compare feedburner feeds.

Check this..

Available at here

Althaf 02 Nov 2007 at 3:29 pm

Interesting. I didnt know John Chow was gaming BlogRush for best headlines on the widget. Where did you get this info from?

Jon 02 Nov 2007 at 5:29 pm

The one thing that gets me though is that Shoe was encouraging people to sign up in multiple feed readers to get more entries into a contest. All’s fair, but I think that his numbers may be inflated considering the contest got multiple subscriptions per person.

Thomas Sinfield 03 Nov 2007 at 5:06 pm

I think they both won, cause they both got a heap of new rss readers on their blogs.

{ 4 trackbacks }

How did John Cow manage to get 8294 more subscribers in one day?
07.27.08 at 10:01 pm
How did John Cow manage to get 8294 more subscribers in one day?
07.27.08 at 10:01 pm
How did John Cow manage to get 8294 more subscribers in one day?
07.27.08 at 10:01 pm
  Why is Feedburner Subscriber Count Important ? How Can I Increase My Feedburner Subscriber Count? by Gautam H N
11.30.08 at 5:35 am

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