[Update] we now have a much better way to assess the popularity of each feed inside Superfeedr by combining many different signals, from the social networks, the feed readers… etc. Check our schema for details and see how to use Superfeedr to subscribe to the most popular content on the web.!
Several of our users in the past asked us whether we had a list of the most popular news feeds available on the web. Obviously, the definition of popular varies from a person to another, but it’s certainly possible to establish a list of feeds from the main sources, the most read blogs, the biggest newspaper and news sites, or the most influential people’s streams.
The easiest way for us is to extract the list of the most subscribed feeds on Superfeedr. We currently have a ratio of 1.27 subscriptions for each feed, so, indeed, we have feeds with a lot of subscriptions (up to several dozens!) and many feeds with only 1. Unfortunately, when we extracted the list, we quickly found out that there was a strong bias, based on the fact that we host the hubs for many of these feeds, or simply based on the fact that our users may have subscribed to feeds that cannot be generally considered as popular, or haven’t subscribed to feeds that you would be consider as popular.
For example, we have feeds from classifieds sites, or ecommerce websites, which are mostly raw data. These shouldn’t be included in popular news feeds.
Luckily, the web has a lot of sources which could help us constitute this kind of list, with services like Technorati, Techmeme, Google Blog search, Bloglines and many many others… So we were able to extract a list of nearly 40k curated feeds. We have also decided to compare this list with the list of top subscribed on Superfeedr, and here is a list of about 4k feeds that you could consider as being popular from this list of curated feeds.
You can find these lists on our github repo. Feel free to fork, add/remove or even create a new list and we’ll be happy to merge back the changes. Obviously these lists have to be alive. So we will update them too, based on what we find and what people subscribe to!
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