(2003-05-27) Counting Rss Subscribers

Tim Bray on the invisible demand for mechanisms for counting subscribers to an RSS feed. One of the inherent problems with push mechanisms is dealing with the question of whether a subscriber is actually a reader. Are they just too lazy to unsub (or maybe they keep pulling stuff every hour, but only browse your feed once a week, so most of the stuff gets skipped)? And should someone who scans titles be counted the same as someone who reads the full content of entries?

Dave Winer pointed to an approach he put in place last year. Though I think that measures reads instead of people. (And when you click through, it shows Referers not users.)

And when will we see Advertising in RSS feeds? (or will ad-dependent writers simply send just summary content in feeds, so real readers have to come to the site where they get hit with ads?) How will the RssAggregator builders react? If ads aren't obnoxious (e.g. popups, Java), is it right for them to block/filter the ads? Will they get sued?

• Jun12 - Info World starts it. Blech.

  • Ironically, Mark Pilgrim has a great piece on "how to consume RSS safely".

Jon Udell reviews the points.

update: Tim Bray revisits the ideas. He also repeats his recommendation that RssAggregator-s include a hash of the user's email address in the User Agent field of their request, so that Web Server logs will show the info. If they wanted to, the aggregator vendors could whack it into the code by this time next week. I suggest that they consider the idea, for a couple of reasons. First, it will improve their chances of being in the sweet spot if and when some business momentum starts building around this space (Weblog Commercialization). Second, if they don't do it, when Microsoft ships their blogging tool and aggregator built-in to Office or IE or something, you can damn well bet that they'll have the subscriber-tracking stuff there on day one. And wouldn't you rather it was something sane that we worked out together rather than having it based on, say, Passport?