An idea to make a fortune: reliable feed stats

Here’s an idea that should make someone rich. I’m not satisfied with FeedBurner’s ability to count my feed subs. It used to rock, but after Google took over my stats bounce around a lot because it doesn’t collect stats from some services one day, others the next… it could use an algorithm to balance those gaps out – say, figure your average with the missing service and provide that as a clearly marked estimate for part of the total.

But no. It’s crap. And my favorite part? One of my sites keeps gaining and losing the same 70 subscribers to the – wait for it – Google Feedreader service. Yes! According to Google’s Feedburner, there are 70 people who sign up via Google Feedreader every day for a few days, then unsub. It’s always 70. Amazing coincidence, yeah?

On top of all this, there’s a couple of hours most every morning when I get logged out 6-8 times before I can actually get to my Analysis page and see what services it managed to catch today, so as to make my own estimate based on the assumption that these 70 people who keep dropping in and out probably in fact are actually subscribed.

If someone programmed a service that worked reliably – especially if you could actually, you know, log in and navigate more often than not – I would pay at least $5/month to track 5 feeds with it. I might be willing to pay more. What would you be willing to pay? Are there enough of us willing to pay a few bucks for reliable stats to make this worthwhile for some programmer to create?

I think you could have a tiered version of it, too, with some kind of freebie option. Like, it’s free if you link back to the site, but you have to pay to drop that link.

I know I’m only reaching a few people with this blog, so if this is interesting to you at all, post about it on your site too! Let’s see how much interest there is in this idea, and maybe someone will actually do it.

1. Trimming down my feed list
2. Oops! Feed now working
3. Free Place to Automatically Submit Your Blog RSS Feed
4. Google needs to give us real-time stats
5. Where the Pings Are

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