Just a few weeks ago, I blogged about how iGoogle has been slowly building up my site’s popularity. The story has since changed and now Google is becoming the sole source of traffic for Free iTunes Store Downloads. My feed subscribers have increased 4x and I now have over 16,000 subscribers. Google Reader and iGoogle (mostly the latter I suspect) by themselves account for 88% of that number.

The most surprising thing about this growth is that it really is all from Google. I haven’t been linked from anywhere important nor have I been promoting my site. Remember Larry Smith’s econ class where he put up a graph of the 2000 tech bubble, drew an impossible slope and ridiculed investors for their faith in the continuation of that trend? I kind of feel like that (see trend line in red).

On a similar note, Google suddenly has a stranglehold on RSS in general, due to the popularity of their clients (Google Reader, iGoogle) and their acquisition of the Feedburner (feed publishing).