According to our FeedBurner stats, Google Sightseeing recently hit a milestone in terms of number of subscribers; we now average over 100,000 unique subscribers.

Live updating figure

Unfortunately the number of people actually reading the feed on any one day is likely to be far below that, but it’s still seems like a pretty massive number to us. Because FeedBurner numbers are public¹, for any site that uses the service, you can use a free service called FeedCompare to chart their subscriber number against anyone else that uses FeedBurner. Which is how I created the following graph:

(The red line is Google Sightseeing, and the regular drops were due to a long standing bug that incorrectly returned a very small amount of subscribers)

This shows the number of subscribers reported by FeedBurner over the past 24 months, for Google Sightseeing (red), GEarth Blog (blue), Google Earth Hacks (green), and Google Maps Mania (purple).

The big jump in reported numbers back in February ‘07 was when Google took over and Google Reader result began to be shown in the figures, but what’s really interesting is what happened to the Google Sightseeing feed immediately after that…

As you can see, once the Google stats were included, our figures began a steady rise that has continued on exactly the same trajectory ever since. The figures for the Google Earth Blog and Google Maps Mania have remained about the same, whilst GEarth Hacks has had several large jumps – this probably makes sense, as when a site gets a big link from somewhere you might expect a sudden increase in subscriber numbers².

Given the relative flatness of the other graphs, why is it that Google Sightseeing has had such steady growth over the same period?

Although we can’t be sure, and of course the high quality of Google Sightseeing promotes people to tell their friends, but I think this may well be due to Google Reader’s suggestion feature.

So, if you read Google Sightseeing, how did you find it?

Hi, Google Sightseeing.

andy_murray (andy_murray) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out andy_murray’s profile here:

http://twitter.com/andy_murray

Best,
Twitter

We’re proud to say that, after Andy Murray received some flak from the Guardian because he wasn’t following enough people, he has chosen to follow our Google Sightseeing Twitter Feed!

If you haven’t already got a Twitter account, you can get one by signing up for free at twitter.com, and whether you’re famous or not, we’d love it if you chose to subscribe to Google Sightseeing updates at twitter.com/gsightseeing.