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Men's Style Blogs, by Subscribership

YoungAmerican

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I just did a little project for my blog, Put This On, and thought folks might be interested in seeing it. It's many, or perhaps most of the big style blogs ranked by subscribership. Explanation and full post below.

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I often find myself curious as to where various style blogs stack up in terms of readership. Of course, web traffic is tough to measure from the outside, so it can be difficult to tell. One thing that can be easily measured, though, is the number of people subscribing to a site's RSS feed with Google Reader. Reader makes this information public, in fact - just click on "show details" for any given blog and you can see.

I decided to take a quick tour through some of my own subscriptions to see how my favorite style blogs stack up. My Feedburner data suggests that a bit more than 60% of folks who use RSS feeds are using Google Reader these days, so you can guesstimate total subscribership by multiplying these numbers by 1.5 or so. (Note that these numbers reflect feed subscribers only, so who knows how they relate to web traffic - I'd guess sites with older or less web-savvy audiences are less likely to use RSS. Also, some of these blogs are on the Tumblr platform, and may have additional followers there - PTO, for example, has just over 10,000 Tumblr followers in addition to our RSS subscribers.)

Subscribers / Blog

1. 135,063 / The Sartorialist
2. 14,889 / Street Etiquette (Blog)
3. 9,331 / 1001 Rules for My Unborn Son
4. 9,029 / Put This On
5. 6,554 / The Selvedge Yard
6. 5,650 / Selectism
7. 4,903 / ValetMag.com (Main Feed)
8. 4,448 / A Continuous Lean
9. 4,341 / Secret Forts (3,892 Atom, 449 RSS)
10. 4,094 / Kempt
11. 3,839 / Sartorially Inclined (3,382 Atom, 457 RSS)
12. 3,306 / Hypebeast
13. 2,993 / Nerd Boyfriend
14. 2,952 / Unabashedly Prep
15. 2,859 / The GQ Eye
16. 2,645 / Permanent Style (2311 Atom, 334 RSS)
17. 2,609 / The Trad (2,335 Atom, 274 RSS)
18. 2,254 / An Affordable Wardrobe
19. 2,169 / Ivy Style
20. 2,077 / Men's Flair
21. 2053 / [you_have_broken_the_internet] (1,830 Atom, 223 RSS)
22. 1,666 / Mister Crew
23. 1,249 / The Pursuit Aesthetic
24. 1,133 / A Suitable Wardrobe
25. 1096 / Heavy Tweed Jacket (953 Atom, 143 RSS)
26. 1,018 / Start With Typewriters
27. 830 / Prepidemic
28. 757 / Style Salvage
29. 745 / Made to Measure
30. 717 / BROG aka Most Exerent
31. 637 / All Plaidout
32. 621 / The Style Blogger
33. 611 / Valet. > Style
34. 596 / The Choosy Beggar
35. 545 / How To Talk To Girls At Parties
36. 531 / The Bengal Stripe (448 Atom, 83 RSS)
37. 527 / Gilt MANual
38. 471 / Less.Gentle.Men.of.Meager.Mean
39. 412 / Parisian Gentleman
40. 364 / Black Watch
41. 351 / Commerce with a Conscience
42. 348 / The Agatine Eyelet
43. 340 / Archival Clothing
44. 320 / Alex Grant
45. 319 / Style Hunting
46. 288 / This Fits
47. 286 / English Cut
48. 283 / Inventory
49. 245 / SUITS+BOOTS
50. 236 / Components of Enthusiasm
51. 230 / N'East Style
52. 224 / Street Etiquette (Tumblr)
53. 213 / Short Shrifted
54. 192 / The Italian Cut
55. 182 / free/man
56. 156 / Rob K. Sawyer
57. 153 / The Sunday Best
58. 138 / The Silentist
59. 131 / tredici e lupo
60. 126 / Men In This Town
61. 121 / Bow Tied and Starry Eyed
62. 114 / Cooper Frederickson
63. 112 / Well-Plaid
64. 75 / Sleevehead
65. 69 / The Suits of James Bond

(Note that I left off blogs with less than 50 folowers, and I did this by hand with no real criteria for inclusion, so please don't be offended if you or your favorite blog was left out. You can always look it up and add it in to your own private list that you make, or email me and maybe I'll add it if I've got time. Also: this counts only one feed, and some sites may have separate Atom and RSS feeds, so lmk if you got undercounted for that reason and I can correct.)
 

alliswell

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Can you repost with this as an importable RSS list (or whatever the correct term is - I'm getting old).
 

YoungAmerican

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Originally Posted by alliswell
Can you repost with this as an importable RSS list (or whatever the correct term is - I'm getting old).

I think that's called an OPML.

I can't, but the post on my blog has links. If there was an easy way to copy and past them ehre, I would, but it took me like an hour to add them on the blog, and I don't care to repeat
smile.gif
.
 

Fred H.

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Very interesting post, YA. Thanks for sharing. Like your blog a lot, BTW. Keep up the good work.
 

CruzAzul

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I'm pretty sure my Mom reads mine. And I get a lot of fan mail from Nigerian royalty.
 

Merlino

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Big thanks for the list!
 

Philip1978

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Originally Posted by Fred H.
Very interesting post, YA. Thanks for sharing. Like your blog a lot, BTW. Keep up the good work.

+1
 

Kent Wang

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Where does **** Yeah Menswear rank?
 

stubloom

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Agreed. Great post.

But i'd love to see a similar list based on unique visitors -- the number of individuals who visit a particular blog in a specified period of time, say a month, irrespective of the number of visits they pay to that site during that time period.

I, for one, visit about 10 sites on a daily basis (they're bookmarked) and yet I don't subscribe. So I would not be counted in that list.

Take Will Boehlke's blog, "A Suitable Wardrobe", for example. It's number 24 on the list with 1,133 subscribers. Yet my understanding is that it has over 100,000 unique visitors every month.

Young American, you have your next research assignment!
 

SimonC

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Interesting; I'm wary of using these numbers raw and drawing any meaningful conclusion, but I'm certainly surprised at the relatively low readership of some blogs that seem to generate quite a lot of hype.
 

YoungAmerican

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Originally Posted by Kent Wang
Where does **** Yeah Menswear rank?
They have about 1000 subscribers. When I made the list, I couldn't find their RSS feed (they don't have an auto-discover, and it's buried on their page), but I just found it and added it to the list. I'd guess that their low total reflects how hard it is to find their feed.
 

YoungAmerican

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Originally Posted by stubloom
Agreed. Great post. But i'd love to see a similar list based on unique visitors -- the number of individuals who visit a particular blog in a specified period of time, say a month, irrespective of the number of visits they pay to that site during that time period. I, for one, visit about 10 sites on a daily basis (they're bookmarked) and yet I don't subscribe. So I would not be counted in that list. Take Will Boehlke's blog, "A Suitable Wardrobe", for example. It's number 24 on the list with 1,133 subscribers. Yet my understanding is that it has over 100,000 unique visitors every month. Young American, you have your next research assignment!
I certainly agree - I think I made that clear in the post. Unfortunately, there's no real way to judge traffic from the outside. I'd guess that none of our sites make enough of an impact to be accurately judged by the Alexas of the world. Also, I find unique visitors to be an odd way to judge. Gives too much weight to randoms who googled something. I think even raw traffic might be a better way to judge, as it helps gauge engagement (no pun intended). That's got problems, too, of course. I'd definitely say that a site like Will's (A Suitable Wardrobe) is likely to be an outlier for the relationship between subscribers and visitors, because I'm guessing he has a much older average audience than say Sartorially Inclined or what have you. I'd also guess that one of the reasons Street Etiquette has so many subscribers (besides their great content) is that they only post about once a month, so they're not the sort of site you bookmark and visit daily.
 

apropos

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Eh, selectism is more an advertising mouthpiece than a 'men's style blog'.

It used to be a font of offbeat cool and often interesting things but its becoming more and more a front for pushing the latest and greatest fads in GQ-land.

Find it pretty funny how many sites rely (knowingly?) on mispronouncing 'plaid' in a play on words.
 

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