Syndication Gumption

So from the email they sent out:

Yahoo! News Restatement - May 10, 2007
We have determined a URL coded to the Yahoo! News definition (rss.news.yahoo.com) should be removed from the reporting data beginning with April 2007. The URL contributed traffic to Yahoo! News throughout the past 13 months (March 2006 - 2007) - providing a small amount of incremental Unique Audience for the Channel (2-3%) but, in recent months, contributing as much as 20-25% of the page views and time spent. We will be reposting the data within the Trend Report in the near future. In the interim, please contact your Sales or Client Service Representative to receive an offline correction file across all Standard Metrics.

The domain (rss.news.yahoo.com) is where Yahoo runs all their RSS feeds related to news.  What this indicates is people using RSS are driving an increasing number of page views and time spent around the content.  Not clear if it’s in the feed itself or on the actual web site.  Likely on the web site.  Regardless, a clear indicator of the not only the adoption of RSS but the actual usage of the feed’s content.

It measures activity from subscribers AND people who don’t subscriber.  Here is one example where twice as many people, that includes the subscribers, interacted with the feed’s content which are mostly clicks back to the web site.  So how does a publisher determine the number of subscribers consistently reading their content.  And from an advertiser prospective, is the “reach” calculation a valid measure to evaluate an ad campaign especially when buying on a CPM.  Think about this happening once a week for a publisher.  With 2000 subscribers and 25% reach, one reach spike (double the subscriber base) makes the weekly reach average 50%.

So what is missing when it comes to RSS metrics?  A whole lot when you think about it.

New/Returning Subscribers
Just like email, the monthly number of subscribers who have opted-out and the number of opt-ins.

Attention or Readership
The number of direct subscribers (people who have added the feed to an aggregator) viewing or clicking on at least one article in 24 hours.

Day of Week and Day Part Viewing/Clicking
And mix in the publisher’s articles date and time (pubDate) to understand consumption behavior.

Extended Reach
Taking Feedburner’s current measure and differentiating when direct subscribers and non-subscribers interact with the feed’s content.

Time-Spent
This is a really big stretch especially based on how “subscribers” are counted.  Most high-end web analytics packages (Omniture, Coremetrics, etc.) provide time-spent reporting.  Time-spent is the best indicator of the opportunity to monetization a publisher’s content.

These are just general metrics.  Two future articles will get into podcast and advertising analytics/reporting.