Andy Beard has written his own take on the Feedburner Chicklet Blog Meme: Do People Use Feed Counters To Show Off? Andy’s post is as usual very thorough and explores every aspect of why a blogger may display a feed count.

Some notable points he makes are that he believes it does encourage new readers to subscribe, that it also may influence advertisers who may otherwise see only partial statistics, it also may draw subscribers to link to your blog, and that it tends to increase the sense of your blog’s authority. All of these make a lot of sense to me. His last point seems to be that chicks may dig it. I won’t even attempt to argue with this; everyone knows that bloggers attract the hot females.

There is a discussion of the effect of MyBlogLog on things, too. I’ve found that being a member of MyBlogLog has increased my traffic somewhat and seems to also have increased the number of subscribers here at FreshBlogger. It’s definitely been a positive for this blog so far.

Andy also has included a top 10 list of how to increase your number of subscribers. Some of these may be somewhat difficult for most of us, but a few are definitely within reach. Writing good, useful content will always be the number one thing with marketing that content as a strong number two.

I have no doubt that the number of subscribers to your RSS feed is very important, but it may not be the most important thing to advertisers as Andy points out. A highly targeted niche with a small number of subscribers may be considered of even more value to a potential advertiser. Either way, check out Andy’s article and don’t forget to read the comments, too.