Toluu Stats Provide Blog Readership Insights

Toluu, the RSS sharing and suggestion service, has found some interesting trends when exploring their subscription data.  Caleb Elston, Toluu’s founder, tells me that of the 300,000+ feeds in Toluu more than 50% only have only 1 subscriber.  And that the number 1 feed has 10x the number of subscribers as the 100th most popular feed.

Caleb says this tells him “that the mega blogs are not where it is at, they may have a large audience but people actually subscribe to a remarkable assortment of feeds based on their own interests and connections to the blog, independent of what others think of the blog”. This is great news for small independent blogs, it shows that small blogs are still important to their readers and while large blogs are getting a lot of views, they don’t own the market.

This data also proves just how valuable a service like Toluu is to blog readers and writers, and validates Caleb’s belief that a niche existed in content recommendation through RSS feeds.  I asked Caleb how he saw that niche and why he decided to create Toluu:

I knew that even though the majority of my feeds were tech related I had feeds about package design, accounting regulations, and blogs written by some college friends. I had a feeling that even though we all have some core interests, that are shown in our feeds, we would also be subscribing to a variety of other feeds that would not be well known, or that had simply been discovered by accident some time ago and has since become a favorite. I wanted there to be a place to share these feeds. The really interesting thing is, that once you read a blog for a while, you expect that anyone that would be interested in what it discusses already know about it, just like many tech people assume everyone who cares about tech sites knows TechCrunch, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb.  I remember discovering Mashable not too long ago after looking over the shoulder of a friend at work.

These thoughts on how Toluu helps us understand blog readership better have been written for Profy by David Knight who blogs at The KnightKnetwork.com. If you would like to become a Toluu user you can post a comment here (no need to expose you e-mail address, just submit a valid email in the comment form). If you would like to hear some more from Caleb Elston then I suggest you check out this interview David did with him shortly after Toluu’s launch.  For more about Toluu be sure to see Profy’s earlier coverage Toluu and Twubble: Forget Searching and Look for Suggestions.