For example, Contentious probably has a lot of bloggers and tech workers that subscribe to its RSS feed. These types of people tend to have their computers on and connected to the net for long hours every day, so they’re likely to generate multiple requests for the RSS file every day. Hard-core bloggers are likely to shorten their feed reader’s polling interval, too, so they can respond to new postings quickly. So they’ll generate even more requests for the RSS file each day.

At the other end of the scale, readers of a seniors site might only get online a couple of times a week, and only stay online for 1 or 2 hours at a time. So their feed readers would only generate 1 or 2 hits on the RSS file per week.

If you want to estimate the number of subscribers to your RSS feed, it would probably be better to do something like count the number of unique IP addresses that request your RSS file per day (or maybe per week). It wouldn’t be entirely accurate because of dynamic address allocation, but it would be a reasonable estimate.

It seems as if this would be the easiest option – after all, the reader providers are the closest to the user. I brought the subject up with our engineers and they think that a this data would be relatively easy to provide to the individual syndicators (and other content providers, for that matter). Of course, it would need to be done without raising privacy concerns (raw numbers, not linked to specific readers).

I’d love to challenge other RSS and news reader creators to provide this service. But here is the question: should we charge for it (something small, probably, like a few dollars a month)? make it available publically, a la popularity indexes? or should it be a requirement for doing business (and hoping that you will refer your subscribers to us)?