Last night while looking at the new Feedburner design (well done guys!), I noticed that my subscriber stats figure has suddenly jumped. My current count of RSS subscribers in Feedburner is 3744. The main reason is that Rojo has just been added to Feedburner's numbers - previously it was missing. What surprised me is the extent of Rojo's impact on my stats. Rojo has overtaken Bloglines as the number 1 RSS Aggregator for my readers. Here is my current top 10:
Rojo
Bloglines
NetNewsWire
Newsgator Online
ThePortNetwork
Firefox Live Bookmarks
MyYahoo
Google Desktop
FeedDemon
SharpReader
A few quick comments on that:
- 7 of my top 10 are web-based RSS Readers (I'm counting Google Desktop in that). And 7 of the top 8 are web-based! Possibly that reflects my own bias towards web-based apps, which presumably a lot of my readers share.
- On the other hand, NetNewsWire is still going strong in 3rd place, which probably reflects my geek cred ;-)
- Rojo and Bloglines dominate my stats, which suggests to me that the other web-based readers have a lot of ground to catch up (and there are tons of new web-based feed readers on the market currently).
Coincidentally yesterday, before I found out about the Rojo numbers in my Feedburner, I decided to give Rojo another try. I've been increasingly frustrated by Bloglines - it doesn't cut the mustard anymore in terms of organising one's feeds, tracking topic feeds and in general adding value to my feed-reading existence.
Already I've noticed that Rojo's performance has improved since I last checked (that was my number one complaint about Rojo) and its added some neat new functionality - e.g. you no longer need to physically click the "Mark as Read" button. So I'll be using Rojo for the short term and perhaps in time it will convince me to stick around :-)
My question to Bloglines: when are we going to see these new improvements you've promised in the past? You'd better hurry up, because it's clear that Rojo is eating your lunch.
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Same here. Essentially Rojo somehow tells FeedBurner how many subscribers it has for a given feed whereas in the past it was just reporting one subscription.
That *does* make a difference.
Posted by: Jeff Clavier | September 1, 2005 3:24 PM
Richard, what metrics are you using to determine this top 10 list? Are you using hits or sessions? I ask because it's important to know that neither metrics are accurate. For example NetNewsWire will hit a feed twice an hour where Feeddemon will only hit it once an hour. Some readers pay attention to modified file indicators and not produce an actual hit as I understand it (I am still a little fuzzy how that works), where others seem to disregaurd it hit the page and pull the full feed even if it hasn't been updated. So, in short, you can't base your most popular feed reading tool simply on hits... sessions may be a bit more accurate, but still not nearly even 50% accurate.
Posted by: Nick Finck | September 1, 2005 4:11 PM
Hi Nick, the top 10 is based purely on Feedburner's circulation numbers. Feedburner defines circulation as:
"An approximate measure of the number of individuals for whom your feed has been requested in the last 24 hours. Circulation is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Circulation is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed.
Circulation is calculated by matching IP address and news reader combinations, and then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers and aggregators and bots on the market to make additional inferences."
Posted by: Richard MacManus | September 1, 2005 4:18 PM
Ok, so there is a gap there to keep in mind: all of the users who read your feed that don't use feedburner.
Posted by: Nick Finck | September 1, 2005 4:37 PM
No, *all* of my feeds go through Feedburner. I have htaccess redirects on my original pre-Feedburner RSS feeds.
So every person who reads my RSS feeds is being counted.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | September 1, 2005 4:42 PM
Well, there may be one or two alias feeds around that aren't being picked up by Feedburner. But by and large most of my readers are being counted in Feedburner's stats. The usual caveats about RSS stats apply though :-)
Posted by: Richard MacManus | September 1, 2005 4:44 PM