FeedBurner Stats

There are a lot of us starting to pore over our Feedburner stats and we aren't sure what to make of them.

Pamela Parker has a good post on this topic.

A number of comments on my "It's The Feed Stupid" post suggest that the "default pings" from feedreaders are generating hypergrowth numbers that just aren't accurate. Other comments suggest that it's easy to figure out which pings are actual requests for a post and which pings are just "checking in".

I don't know the answer, but here are my feedburner stats for the past 7 days. I'd really love to know if my feed is growing that fast.

Comments

[Mark Fletcher]

I believe those numbers are drastically overstating your growth. As has been pointed out elsewhere, user measurement based on hits to RSS feeds is prone to dramatic overstatement. That's a tough nut to crack.

To get a more accurate measure on the growth of your feed readership, I suggest looking at your Bloglines readership count and your My Yahoo readership count. Both numbers are published by our respective crawlers when we fetch your feed. Right now, for example, 90 Bloglines users are subscribed your feed.

There's no way to know what percentage of your readership uses Bloglines instead of a desktop aggregator, so extrapolating a total reader count from that number can't be done. But you should be able to use it as a proxy for seeing how fast your 'aggregator' readership is growing.

[Dick Costolo]

Hi Fred, we have been collecting a significant number of metrics over the past couple months that we are using to dramatically improve the reporting and sophistication of the feed statistics we provide. Yes, the current viewer numbers are likely inflated due to bots, pings from clients that don't issue appropriate http requests, and more. As Mark points out in his comment, some of the aggregators pass along the number of subscribers in their user-agent requests, and we will be reporting those in detail in our enhanced statistics pages. We will, in fact, have a much more detailed measure of your total subscribers, and we will provide a good deal of transparency to those feed hits about which we can't determine detailed information. You, Brad Feld, and others have been asking the right questions for a couple weeks now, and we hope to be able to provide you with a significantly enhanced measure of readership and trends in the very near future.

[Chevsky]

I'd be interested in knowing if there is any correlation between an increase in the number of people accessing by feed and a potential decrease in web traffic. Have you noticed? The reason I ask is that your talk of RSS and aggregators actually prompted me to download one last night (I'm demoing PulpFiction). Also, I'd be interested to know if any developers have considered using the onclick event (or equivalent) plus cookies to try to track humans accessing their feed buttons. It would seem that much of the same process for tracking ads could be applied to feeds. Any thoughts?