Google Webmaster Central adds Subscription Data

Google announced last week the addition of subscriber stats to its Google Webmaster Central:

First of all, subscriber stats are now available. Webmaster Tools now show feed publishers the number of aggregated subscribers you have from Google services such as Google Reader, iGoogle, and Orkut. We hope this will make it easier to track subscriber statistics across multiple feeds, as well as offer an improvement over parsing through server logs for feed information.

I’ve seen assumption that once Google gets his arms around these subscription stats, an implementation of this data into its Universal Search platform (& algorithm) would be a breeze, and it may as well happen. However, what do you do if you have no current subscribers or anything to offer as a feed?

Some verticals are obviously not “feed materials” but not necessarily need one either. So I guess the trick would be to look around and see what your competitors. Obviously, a newly updated feed would be a sign that you may be missing something, but if no one has it and there isn’t really any frequent news to report I wouldn’t worry about it for now.