You may be wondering where this is stemming from, well Corvida from SheGeeks asked:

“For those that have their RSS subscriber stats on their blog, when did decide to put yours up? At what number do you think it’s beneficial for others to do the same?”

My first reaction was that I will not share my subscriber numbers, not because I’m ashamed of my readership count (I’m not) but because I want to avoid the whole sheep “me too” mentality of people subscribing to my blog just because everybody else does.

It’s all about engagement for me.

I would much prefer to have 100 engaged readers, who enjoy my content and actively participate by commenting and sharing their opinions than being just another unread feed in a feed reader somewhere.

Lets be honest, the lemmings who subscribe to your blog just because everybody else does are of very little value to you as a blogger.

If all they’re doing is adding a +1 to your subscriber count but not participating in the conversation, or spreading the word about your posts what value are they to you.

Okay, it may look impressive to have 1000 subscribers, but if only 10 are listening it’s just a pie in the sky number in terms of user engagement.

Not only are these subscribers of no value to you because they’re not engaging with, promoting, or clicking on the ads which surround, your content, they’re actually adding to your bandwidth bill.

That’s right. Every time they scroll past your article in a feed reader, they pull your content and any embedded images, resulting in a bandwidth usage which ultimately you have to pay for.

Okay, so lets say that you don’t particularly care about engagement and are all about the numbers. When is it a good idea to put up the button with the subscriber count?

My gut would tell me that to have the maximum effect to the herd brain I would wait until the subscriber count passes 200. Anything less makes you appear small time.

But that’s just me.

The only true advice I’d have for you is that if you do intend to display your subscriber numbers on your blog then don’t fake it. I’ve written about this (and how to do it best to fake it) before. The consequences can be very bad for your true subscriber count.

What do you guys think? When should you, or should you even consider, putting up a subscriber count button on your site?

After all, this isn’t a mine is bigger than your issue is it?

(Paul appears on FuelmyblogTV every show)