Traffic Stats and RSS

An inter­est­ing thing hap­pened recently. I was play­ing around with Andrew Grumet’s tool based on the infor­ma­tion in Share Your OPML and dis­cov­ered that a num­ber of peo­ple still sub­scribe to old feeds. This has direct impact on what stats can look like.

While I do receive a fair amount of traf­fic on the RSS feeds (col­lec­tively, about 60,000 requests a day), it is hard to know which ones are new requests vs. which ones are reg­u­lar sub­scribers. Going beyond that, it is also hard to know whether some­one actu­ally reads the stuff. HTML email allows for this kind of track­ing but RSS is not mature enough to pro­vide rich data that could be of use to mar­keters or stats fans like myself.

While the sub­scrip­tion to cat­e­gory feeds gives me an idea as to what peo­ple are inter­ested in (and shows how few peo­ple are inter­ested in my per­sonal life, con­firm­ing a deep-seated sus­pi­cion that I’m as bor­ing in the vir­tual world as I am in the real one ), it is hard to know whether peo­ple sub­scribed, read, or clicked on links. I guess I could set up some track­ing info to trap that infor­ma­tion but I’m sure that it would infu­ri­ate some people.