November 21, 2007
Feedburner Stats...
One of the things I'm starting to think about for OpenLearnigg is how I could in prinicple start to track subscriber numbers to feeds. This is something I'll post more about later, but here's something to bear in mind whenever someone quotes "subscriber numbers" at you from Feedburner...
A screenshot from a post that just appeared on Stowe Boyd's blog: A Watershed At /Message: 50K+ Views In Last 30 Days:
The screenshot appeared with a short commentary: "I noticed this morning (via Feedburner stats) that /Message has received over 50,000 views in the last 30 days, which is a new high water mark. Over 28K RSS subscribers, too."
Here's a similar report for OUseful.info:
So I reckon Stowe's blog has 4 times or so the reach of OUseful.info?
Feedburner describe the reach measure as "the total number of people who have taken action "viewed or clicked" on the content in your feed." The number of subscribers measure is described in A Peek Inside TechCrunch's 100k Subscribe Milestone.
Further commentary can be found in How Feedburner Adds Up Subscriber Numbers.
Whilst "reach" offers a more useful measure that subscriber numbers (subscriber counts are likely to be large if your feed is syndicated/prebundled with "autorecommended" feed subscriptions on some news reading services, where it is unlikely most people will look at your feed) it is subject to error - particularly if you have offline readers as What does Feedburner's "Reach" Really Mean? describes.
Why? Well, my understanding is that the "view" measure gives a record of how many times the page has been rendered as HTML by an online client (a 1x1 pixel image is embedded in the page by Feedburner, which can then be tracked each time it is rendered). If you look at the page offline, or with images disabled, the view won't count.
Clicks describes how many links in the feed have been clicked through - I think...
I'm going to have to find some time somewhen (?!) looking at server side stats tools for feeds, I think, particularly in the context of daily learning feeds (I'm not sure what sorts of stats Yahoo Pipes offers? I need to go and check...). But then, I've said that before ("Issues With OpenLearn RSS Feeds - Obtaining User Statistics").
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Tags: feedstats, statistics, RSS
Posted by ajh59 at November 21, 2007 04:20 PM