Also bothered me that folks didn’t read the “send in feedback and make your complaint there, not here” posts. I would think that bloggers were intellegent folks. Guess not.

What also bothered me is that it’s common knowledge that they were broken, didn’t return the correct numbers and folks still wanted to see them.

Oh, by the way, thanks for the Not Staff logos.

Here’s more on why FeedBurner stats are so much better than the old wordpress.com stats (posted around a week before the wordpress.com feed stats were removed)

Why don’t they just throw in the towel already?

Um, because their demographic loves stats so much?

You are asking Automattic to devote further time and resources to a task they have just admitted they have already failed. They wouldn’t have removed the feature if they seriously thought it was fixable. While I don’t think the withdrawal was handled particularly well, in retrospect I don’t really know what else they could have done.

I would like to see WordPress.com give a high priority to fixing up the feed stats code and re-implementing it within a few weeks.

Currently I think they’re giving a high priority to implementing flashier, more visible stuff like related posts and Adsense widgets. Something had to give. Besides, there are so many feed readers and feed formats out there that accurate feed stats are pretty much a pipe dream. They must have wasted a lot of time trying to fix it before giving it up as a bad job.

I think you are wrong when you suggest that it is mostly newbies who would care about feed stats. I think newbies would be more concerned about blog stats and more technically inclined and longer-term users would be more concerned about feed stats. My reason for thinking this is that feeds are a slightly more technically advanced topic and a much newer concept to most people than webpages. I think feed stats, if properly implemented, can give a user an idea as to how many loyal readers he has better than blog stats. For example, if a user has around 100 hits a day on blog stats for a few months and then about 200 hits for two weeks he might think that his readership has gone up. And one would expect that to be reflected in feed stats too, people who read one’s blog via a feedreader being a subset of overall readers. However, if he did not see the feed stats increase, he could probably safely assume that his newfound readership is going to be shortlived, and after two weeks time he’d probably see a decrease in the number of page hits he gets. In other words, feed stats can be a more stable measure of readership than blog stats.

feed stats were elderly fried teenage roses?

I’m trying to combine those into something that makes sense. Maybe feed stats were a sunburned teenager with progeria with a family who would benefit from his death (life insurance policy?).