No Changes in RSS Metrics

So I did a search on Google - RSS metrics.  The number 1 and 2 article was an interview I did with Rok of The RSS Diary and Dick from Feedburner.  That is crazy.  There has been nothing so new as to something we argued about over 2 years ago.  By the way, SimpleFeed is using search marketing.  Nice job!

Feedbuner has two primary measures (and I believe Pheedo has something similar):

Subscribers (which use to be called “circulation") is defined as:
an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to a feed. (full details ).

Reach (which is not the same as web reach) is defined as:
the total number of people who have taken action - viewed or clicked - on the content in your feed. (full details )

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.



Added on: February 20, 2007 Please add your feedback.
Tagged as: attention, metrics, rss, rss metrics, syndication, time spent, web analytics,
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