Darren Rowse at problogger posed the question, “Why do you unsubscribe from blog feeds”. He got a lot of responses as is usual, and grouped them all into “34 Reasons Why People Unsubscribe From Your blog“.

Not surprisingly, frequency and quality of posting dominate the top of the list, but presentation plays a bg factor as well, with nearly a quarter of respondents saying that they unsubscribe because of partial feeds, or feed excerpts.

Now the knee jerk response to such an article is to examine the list and change everything that might be costing you subscribers. I mean you do want subscribers, right? And once you’ve got them, you want to keep them, no doubt.

But wait a minute. Remember that frequency is the biggest thing on the list. Specifically that too many posts would trigger 34% of the respondents to unsubscribe. But that flies in the face of the fact that many of the top blogs out there post an average of 30 times a day.

So before you just start making changes be sure to consider your audience. If you’re in the tech toys market, like engadget, you probably aren’t seeing too many unsubs for posting too often. On the other hand if your blog is really serving as a platform for your newsletter, like nicheBOT, Your readers are going to stay subscribed even though you post every week or two.

Then there’s the excerpt or full post argument. I know that some people will not subscribe to this blog, or will unsubscribe from it based solely on the fact that I publish excerpt, not full posts. I’m OK with that, largely because I have a good idea of who is staying subscribed, and they are the ones I am posting to any ways.

That said, I do something to try to minimize the effect. I do not let WordPress, or any plug in, automatically generate my excerpts. I hand roll every one of them. My excerpts are a short sentence to paragraph of focused copy designed to let the reader know what I’m posting about and invite them to come read it. Yes, that’s right I wrote every excerpt on this blog as a personal invitation to you to come read the post.

But the REAL question is…

You have to have subscribers before you can have unsubscribe rs. I’d love to see Darren ask “What makes you subscribe to a blog”. I’m sure we can all predict the top of that list fairly accurately. But I also suspect that there will be some answers that shed light on why some people didn’t subscribe even though we thought we had given them good reason. Those little things that add up to big differences in readership levels.

That would be a great article.

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Dane Morgan wrote this just before lunchtime: