Counting RSS users
Posted by Scott Laird Tue, 08 Nov 2005 03:43:42 GMT
One of the great problems with RSS is that it’s really hard to know how many readers you have. Feedburner is supposed to be able to help with that, but I’m reluctant to outsource my RSS feeds to them–I’m not really sure how I’d get them back if I decided to can Feedburner. So, while I know that I’m averaging around 1,300 JavaScript-enabled page hits per day on my blog, I have *no* idea how many people are reading via RSS. On one level, it doesn’t really matter, but I find that I’m more willing to write when I know that people are reading, and the more readers I have, the more time I’m willing to spend writing.
The problem is that there isn’t a 1:1 correspondence between RSS downloads and readers, like there is for normal web pages (modulo caching and a few other issues). Bloglines is helpful enough to tell me that it has around 60 subscribers, and I know that I’ve served up around 24,000 RSS and Atom feeds so far this month, but I have no easy way to know if that’s 1,000 people with a slow refresh set or 11 people refreshing every 5 minutes, or even 50,000 people all reading via a portal. Plus, there are at least three “planet” sites syndicating one feed or another (PlanetRubyOnRails, PlanetTypo, and Planet Foo), and I have no clue how many readers they have, either via HTML or RSS.
I’ve been tempted to integrate a 1-pixel “web bug” into Typo’s RSS feeds more then once, but I don’t really like the privacy implications. Fortunately or unfortunately, I get the same effect any time I post an image here. The Flickr montage that I posted almost 8 hours ago has resulted in 347 image hits. Of those, 150 have no referrer, so they’re probably from standalone RSS readers, like NetNewsWire. Another 95 are from scottstuff.net, followed by 42 from Planet Ruby On Rails, then 24 from Bloglines, 16 from Planet Typo, 3 from Planet Foo, 3 from Google Reader, and a couple that are either comment spammers or internal feeds from stealth companies.
Does anyone have any good leads on how to track this sort of thing on a more regular basis? While we’re at it, does Feedburner just play session cookie games, or are they doing something clever? Finally, it seems clear that embedding images into RSS feeds works most of the time, but I’ve never heard of anyone using web bugs with RSS–did I just miss the discussion, or are people avoiding them?
I’d take another look at Feedburner, you don’t really outsource your feeds to them.
I have a FeedBurner feed in addition to my Atom/RSS feeds, but I don’t use it much. But regarding “I’m not really sure how I’d get them back if I decided to can Feedburner” take a look at this article. They seem to be very leaver-friendly.
I use FeedBurner for my meager little blog, and it works pretty well. They are friendly, and do offer a way out if you want, without breaking your feeds.
I think it would add even more value for a commercial site, since you can monetize feeds.
Thanks, that’s really helpful. So they don’t look all that hard to leave, but I’d still like to do most of this myself. In a rational world, I probably wouldn’t bother, but in a rational world I probably wouldn’t be maintaining my own blog software, either :-).
I’ve been thinking about directing my RSS feed to a simple dynamic script that can set cookies and track basic stats (number of readers). I assume that’s all Feedburner is doing, but I haven’t had much luck testing that theory so far.
Your idea of an RSS-only web bug would probably work in most RSS readers too, and it has the interesting side effect of eliminating subscribers who don’t actually read the feed. But I think cookies would have to be involved even for that case.