Feedburner shares their view of the RSS feed market. With 604,533 feeds on behalf of 347,000 bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers – they get a sense of the community like few others.
“Audience engagement, which is to say, people reading feeds and people clicking on feeds – is how we’ve increasingly been interpreting feed subscription numbers to better understand market penetration.”
Some key findings:
- MyYahoo!, Google, and Bloglines drive the lion’s share of clicks and views back to content from blogs tracked by Feedburner.
- Feeds represent only one aspect of a publisher’s overall content consumption. We’re living in a world of distributed media after all: people might be reading your content directly on your site, within a widget, via resyndicated headlines on another site, or on a social networking site.
Marshall Kirkpatrick’s take on the data:
“The moral of the story is that Google Reader has come out of nowhere and stolen the hearts of active RSS users.”
Read/Write Web notes:
“RSS analytics is still very much a nascent industry – i.e. it’s even more difficult to get reliable feed reader stats than it is to get reliable webpage stats.”
Fred Wilson looks at how feed numbers can be inflated, and suggests you focus on the “reach” metric:
“Some of the aggregators auto subscribe their users to the top blogs.”