I spot three [!] main site feeds for their blog.
. In all, 1,099 feed subscribers at BlogLines.
+ Probably the same amount or more at NetVibes.
+ Probably three times more at Google Reader.
= The Freakonomics blog has probably over 5,000 Web-based feed subscribers. (15 times more than Midas Oracle) [Note that the PC-based feed subscribers are not counted here. I suspect that they are less numerous than their Web-based counterparts.]
Still FeedBurner says that Freaknomics has “84,551 readers”. (See on the Freakonomics sidebar.) Where does this number come from?? Does someone know? What do they count as “readers”?
UPDATE: Jed Christiansen…
The 84k number is the full number of subscribers that FeedBurner tracks. That’s essentially each person that has subscribed to the feed. Like I’ve mentioned previously, you must have an abnormally high number of BlogLines readers at Midas Oracle to use the ratio above. The number of people that read my blog via Google Reader is easily more than ten times the number that read it via BlogLines. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s an even bigger ratio for a high profile blog like Freakonomics, since using FeedBurner makes it that much easier to add a feed to Google Reader.
Interesting point. Thanks, Jed.
–> But still… I am not fully convinced. 
