WebSeitz/wikilog
z2003-05-27- Counting Rss Subscribers
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last edited by BillSeitz on Jun 15, 2008 6:36 pm

on the invisible demand for mechanisms for counting subscribers to an 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?

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 in 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 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?

reviews the points.

update: revisits the ideas. He also repeats his recommendation that -s include a hash of the user's email address in the field of their request, so that 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 (). Second, if they don't do it, when 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, ?


 



Bill Seitz, fluxent at gmail dot com, Weblog