How Many People Read Your Webfeed?

From the perspective of many online publishers, webfeeds (whether RSS or Atom format) have one big shortcoming: In most cases, it’s difficult or impossible to know how many people subscribe to your webfeed.

Circulation numbers have always been the cornerstone of the publishing world, and that hasn’t changed in the online age. This is especially true if a site’s business model hinges at all on advertising, or on leveraging relationships with readers to sell other products or services, or to promote a particular organization or issue. For those sites, offering a webfeed feels a bit dangerous – they don’t necessarily fear losing readers, but rather losing track of how many readers they have.

Webfeed metrics is a complex issue that mainly boils down to technology. Most content and publishing people aren’t technical specialists. However, this is one technical area that online publishers probably should understand (on at least a basic level) and follow major developments.

Here are a few good resources to get you started…

WEBFEED METRIC RESOURCES:

• On Jan. 3, 2004, Leo Notenboom explored this topic and proposed a system that would generate a unique webfeed URL for each subscriber. Dave Seidel pondered a similar concept earlier, but Leo explores it in greater depth.

• Tim Bray: Counting Subscribers (May 25, 2003) and Subscribers Redux (June 1, 2003). Several people commented on Bray’s suggestions in their own weblogs, including Jason Brome and Mark Nottingham.

• The popular blogging software Radio Userland offers a Web Bug Simulator that attempts to address this issue. On May 28, 2003, Jon Udell discussed this tool’s pros and cons for counting webfeed subscribers.

• In a Dec. 13, 2003 Lockergnome discussion forum posting, Mark Fletcher of Bloglines suggested embedding a small, blank image in webfeed items, and counting downloads of that image. That can tell you how many people happened to view the text of a particular item – but not necessarily how many people have subscribed to the webfeed.

• On March 11, 2004, I suggested a different approach here in CONTENTIOUS: estimating RSS subscribers via an average polling interval metric. It’s definitely not a perfect idea, but the comments are very interesting.