UPDATE: This list is no longer accurate. Google updated the numbers last night and they all changed pretty dramatically. I’ll update the list later this week when I have time.

Darren Rowse on ProBlogger showed me how to look up how many subscribers I have on Google Reader.

So, I went looking for some numbers.

Keep in mind that these are ONLY for Google Reader, which is only a small percentage of subscribers (although a growing number).

First, though, let’s look at the TechMeme Leaderboard. The numbers of Google Reader subscribers are in parenthesis.

1. TechCrunch (Google Reader says: 117,690 subscribers on one URL, 11,470 on another — this is for US site)
2. New York Times (33,159 for front page, 5,298 for top 10 most emailed items)
3. Engadget (146,449, it lists a number of others too — compare to only 28,289 for Gizmodo)
4. Ars Technica (about 19,000 in quick add up of all their feeds)
5. CNET News.com (14,395)
6. Read/WriteWeb (8,479)
7. The Register (5,826 for main feed, 1,208 for headlines)
8. GigaOM (5,393 subscribers, plus 1,840 for ommalik feed)
9. Silicon Alley Insider (unknown)
10. Computerworld (1,341 for breaking news, 1,959 for top news)
11. InfoWorld (889 for TechWatch blog, 4,384 for top news)
12. eWEEK.COM (5,021 for tech news, about 1,000 for other feeds)
13. Wall Street Journal (2,033 subscribers)
14. Associated Press (532 subscribers)
15. paidContent.org (401 subscribers)
16. AppleInsider (16,326. Compare to 16,646 for MacRumors)
17. BBC (202,463 for front page, 6,971 for Tech)
18. Crave: The gadget blog (3,136)
19. Search Engine Land (3,910, none for new Sphinn)
20. Reuters (4,006 for top news)
21. BusinessWeek (7,209, 3,617 for tech)
22. Bits, New York Times tech Blog (212)
23. Techdirt (12,628)
24. Webware.com (4,071)
25. TorrentFreak (981)
26. Between the Lines (1,588)
27. CrunchGear (4,190)
28. CenterNetworks (254)
29. All About Microsoft (542)
30. VentureBeat (1,138)
31. The Unofficial Apple Weblog (15,457)
32. Gizmodo (28,289)
33. Scripting News (7,594 for Dave Winer’s main blog and 339 for his annex)
34. Rough Type, Nick Carr (1,801)
35. Microsoft (MSDN Blogs where employees blog, 1,357; MSDN magazine, 1,413, Microsoft Research, 2,276, MSDN just published, 5,452, Microsoft’s press releases, 463. Compare to Mini-Microsoft, 3,246. There are a variety of others, but none higher than these)
36. BoomTown + Kara Swisher + AllThingsD (1,325 on Huffington Post, 377 on AllThingsD, 124 on BoomTown)
37. Wired News (104,159 for top stories, 4,291 for science, 2,729 for gadgets. Compare to Google News, which has 192,100).
38. mathewingram.com/work (18)
39. Business Wire (I couldn’t find data here)
40. Scobleizer (600 for ScobleShow, 4894 for Scobleizer, 29 to my Twitter feed,
41. NewTeeVee (1,439)
42. Tech Trader Daily (360)
43 A VC (Fred Wilson) (4,053)
44. PR Newswire (254)
45. Publishing 2.0 (1,270)
46. Forbes (1,058 on Tech News)
47. DailyTech (about 5,500 on main news feed)
48. Epicenter, Wired blog (351)
49. O’Reilly Radar (13,345)
50. Los Angeles Times (415 for top news, 947 for local, 935 for print edition)
51. Todd Bishop’s Microsoft Blog (597)
52. Times of London (988 for UK News from Times Online)
53. All Facebook (196)
54. Valleywag (5897)
55. Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim (1,656)
56. Inquirer (4,908)
57. WebProNews (about 500)
58. The Jason Calacanis Weblog (2,809)
59. Google LatLong (2,210)
60. ZDNet (930)
61. Download Squad (9,095)
62. Google Operating System (12,284)
63. Official Google Blog (71,283 — the Google Reader blog has 49,242)
64. The Boy Genius Report (1,629)
65. Guardian (7,448, 1,750 on World Latest)
66. PC World (2,279 on latest technology news)
67 Google Blogoscoped (41,387)
68. Infinite Loop (1,987)
69. Macworld (10,545, 843 in top stories)
70. Digital Daily (see Kara Swisher above)
71. Istartedsomething (380)
72. Mashable! (8,763)
73. Engadget Mobile (5,673 for mobile feed)
74. 9 to 5 Mac (76)
75. Guardian Unlimited (7448, 1,750 for World Latest)
76. Financial Times (638. Compare to 176,814 for MarketWatch.com)
77. Yodel Anecdotal, Yahoo’s blog (1,050)
78. MediaShift (784)
79. Yahoo! Search Blog (3,509)
80. Washington Post (5,197, 3,502 for politics)
81. Inside AdSense (4,325)
82. Broadcasting & Cable (63)
83. Akihabaranews.com (226)
84. Google Public Policy Blog (1,397)
85. comScore (526)
86: the::unwired (458)
87: ProBlogger Blog Tips (4,586)
88. Think Secret (10,610)
89. BuzzMachine (Jeff Jarvis) (3,166)
90. Agence France Presse (514)
91. ILounge (4,651)
92. Sprint (I couldn’t find)
93. DigiTimes (474)
94. ipodminusitunes (unknown)
95. Doc Searls Weblog (1,397)
96. Reflections of a Newsosaur (22)
97. Googling Google (1,268)
98. Salon (53,909)
99. Insider Chatter (51)
100. Telegraph (1,260)

TechMeme itself has 10,179.

I also picked some of my favorites to see how they rank
Tantek Celik (402)
Shelley Powers (105)
Tara Hunt (1,083)
Jeremiah Owyang (463)
Scott Beale (1,412)
Rodney Rumford (184)
Blognation (5)
Betsy Devine (73)
danah boyd (2,172)
Shel Israel (552)
Chris Pirillo (2,795)
Stephanie Booth (142)
Daily Kos (7,285)
Daring Fireball (10,878)
Darren Barefoot (359)
Derek Powazek (99)
A List Apart (10,542)
Ryan Stewart (478)
Don Dodge (1,324)
Dare Obasanjo (2,261)
Renee Blodget (178)
Ed Bott (1,113)
Michael Gartenberg (475)
Howard Lindzon (257)
Robert Cringley (5,948)
Jeff Clavier (768)
Jeffrey Zeldman (7,459)
John Battelle (35,976)
Joel Spolsky (26,911)
Tim O’Reilly (10,422)
Joi Ito (1,444)
Jon Udell (3,343)
Loic Le Meur (1,538)
Marc Canter (582)
Dave McClure (122)
Steve Rubel (7,676)
Matt Mullenweg (1,990)
Nick Bradbury (1,287)
Noah Kagan (123)
Paul Boutin (143)
Scott Guthrie (5,511)
Tom Raftery (227)
Thomas Hawk (720)
Uncov (754)
Quotationspage.com: (128,748)
Channel 9 (Microsoft’s video community) (2,268)
Leo Laporte (TwiT.TV, 2,854)
Kevin Rose (389)
Digg (14,247 to Digg/Tech; 109,286 for all News and Videos)
Jonathan Schwartz (3796)
Sun’s blogs (161)
Mark Cuban (8,436)
Guy Kawasaki (7,534)
Seth Godin (36,822)
Tom Peters (2,153)

MediaBlitz has its own analysis of the TechMeme leaderboard numbers. Basically it looks like only 5% of the average blog is read in an RSS reader so multiply these numbers by 20 and you’ll probably get close to real traffic levels.

Tim Bray reminds us that these numbers are ONLY for people who subscribed to the feeds in Google Reader. On his server he has 1,455 subscribers for his RSS, 4,403 for his atom feed, while Google Reader reported 3,690 for his feeds.

I’d love to know how many subscribers you have. Can you look your numbers up and put them in a comment? Remember to add up all the various feeds you have (that’s how I got these numbers above).

Enjoy!

The next step? What are you learning here? For one the BBC is one of the only sites that puts “about News Feeds” next to all of its feed icons (they link to a well done page about how to use News Feeds). Any wonder why they get so many subscribers?

UPDATE: Fred Oliveira says that Feed Burner is reporting to him that he has 2,445 subscribers from Google Reader but Google Reader says that Fred only has 524 subscribers from Google Reader. So, these numbers may be WAY off. But they are the data I had to work with. Would love to hear your stories. Tim Bray says he’s seeing a discrepancy too.

UPDATE #2: I might have missed some of your numbers. I tried to find them all, but please correct what you find if you find some that I missed.

UPDATE: #3: One thing you can’t look up? How many subscribers you have to my Google Reader Shared Items Blog.

UPDATE: #4: TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington was doing something similar. I need to go to dinner, otherwise I’d put my list in a spreadsheet like that.

I’m watching this case where Target is in trouble with California’s accessibility laws. I’m wondering when they will come after the videoblogging industry. Go to YouTube. If you’re deaf isn’t that entire site inaccessible?

Now, imagine a world where every video is forced to get a transcript so that it’s accessible to deaf people? Yeah, some sites like mine would just pay to have transcripts done. But most video bloggers can’t afford that. So who would pay for this?

I couldn’t afford to do it for my Kyte.tv channel, for instance. So if there was a law that said that all videos needed to have transcripts so they were accessible I’d be forced to stop doing video.

I guess if such a law were enforced then we’d need a technology solution that would automatically add transcripts to our videos.

If you read my comments on the last post you’ll see the “Scoble-you-don’t-need-more-friends” lobby.

Someone asked why I keep pointing out the 5,000 friends limit. Why? Because I still haven’t gotten through and I’m still getting pushback from the lobby. So, let’s try one more time.

First, a “friend” in Facebook is NOT a “real friend.” (Let’s define “real friend” for now as someone who you’d invite over to your house for dinner). In social networking software a “friend” is someone you want in your social network. Period. Nothing more. The fact that people assume that you should only have “real friends” in your social network is just plain wrong. Do you only hand out business cards to “real friends?” In your contact list in Outlook or Gmail do you only have “real friends?” In your phone book do you only have “real friends?” I don’t. I have some people that I talk with all the time on my phone who I’ve never even met. Heck, I remember meeting Donncha O’Caoimh in Cork, Ireland and he kept asking me about what Matt Mullenweg was like. I thought that was funny because Donncha worked for Matt yet had never met him up to that point (Matt is the founder of Automattic, which is the company that makes the blog service Im using here).

Second, Facebook is NOT just a social networking tool. So, any limitation it has limits all the other functions. We’ll go into those in a second.

Third, Facebook’s engineers tell me that the 5,000 friend limit is there because their engines have scaling problems. In fact, I’ve noticed parts of Facebook slowed down for me at about 3,000 friends. Also lots of stuff broke and didn’t work for me (videos, for instance, didn’t work until just recently for me).

Fourth, it +is+ possible to get thousands of names in your contact list. My friend, Buzz Bruggeman, isn’t “famous” yet has 12,000 names in his Outlook contact list. He used to be a lawyer, now is CEO of ActiveWords, and is one of the world’s best networkers. Imagine you tell him he can’t put more than 5,000 names into his contact list.

Fifth, just because YOU don’t use a system in a hard-core way doesn’t mean that it should be designed for YOU. Imagine a pro camera being designed for someone who only takes pictures three times a year (which is pretty average behavior, actually). Facebook claims they are a “social utility.” Yet there are walls that it has that limit that utility for many users. Facebook employees tell me there are thousands of people who have gotten to 5,000 contacts so I’m not alone.

So, why does this matter?

Well, because inside Facebook is a competitor for these three sites:

1. Flickr. Facebook has its own photo sharing system.
2. Upcoming. Facebook has its own event sharing system.
3. YouTube. Facebook has its own video sharing system.

So, imagine that Flickr only let 5,000 people see your photos? Or that YouTube only let 5,000 watch your videos? Wouldn’t you be pissed? Wouldn’t there be massive protests?

Absolutely. Yet we accept this crappy software engineering because of the “you-don’t-need-more-friends” lobby.

The hell with the lobby.