Page Views per user: RSS blows HTML away
Summary: For my blog, RSS is a much more important content format than HTML these days. In one of my posts, five and a half times more important!
Darren Rowse writes that Page Views per user for blogs is on average relatively low - less than 2 pages per visit. After a bit of research Darren came up with the figure of 1.7 Page Views per visitor for the average blog. I looked at my own stats and found that my Page Views per Unique Visitor was a lowly 1.4 (yikes!) last month. As Darren noted, the average blog reader looks at less than two pages per visit. If you look at our old friend Alexa, you'll see that most of the top websites in the world have high Page Views/Visitor numbers - i.e. they're "sticky" to use an old 1.0 term. The world's most popular website, Yahoo!, has a whopping 16.6 Page Views per user.
I've done a lot of research using Alexa over the past 6 months or so and I know that most good web sites average around 4-5 Page Views per user. So blogs are definitely below average, compared to more traditional websites. That's to be expected really, because RSS has become the method of both delivery and reading blog content. Especially so for a blog like mine, which offers a full-content RSS feed and is mostly read within RSS Aggregators. That doesn't worry me (quite the contrary), although it does mean I earn less revenue from ads on my site.
I was discussing RSS page views with someone last week, so I decided to compare the RSS and HTML page views from a single post of mine - Portals 2.0 flesh out their product lines. According to Feedburner Pro, that item was viewed 4884 times in my RSS feed over the past 30 days. Looking at the same post in MeasureMap (which btw is almost unusable currently due to extremely slow downloads!) it's been viewed 876 times on my website over the past 30 days. So with that rough calculation, my posts are viewed 5.5 times more via RSS than on the website! I'll do more analysis when I get time, but even this small example proves that RSS is a much more important content format than HTML these days, for my blog. I'd be interested in knowing if this is the case for other blogs.
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Interesting... who would have thought that just 2 years ago?
Take away full feeds and I think that number will change significantly.
The numbers are probably even more in that direction. I read your feed in via an IMAP account as email. I do not have images or Javascript turned on unless I specifically hit a button on a given post. As a result, none of my views are registered by Feedburner. Anyone who is viewing your feed via text rather than rendered HTML isn't even showing up in that number.
I did actually show the image on this post, just to verify that it was a transparent web bug, which it is.
You have to remember who is using the Alexa toolbar that is giving them their data. Most techy types aren't. Similarly most techy types are going to use RSS to monitor your site. Therefore you've got two marginally overlapping groups of viewers. Case in point me, no Alexa, got here via RSS. Also I typically don't read via RSS, just find and then click through to the site. Also J Wynia's point is valid as well, unless you mine your logs, you've got no idea what the "true" numbers are.
I also have low per visit page views - however (and in common with a lot of/most other blogs) I have a lot of posts on my homepage so there is less need for a visitor to navigate around. As opposed to websites that usually scroll down very little.
keith
Has the issue of computer views vs. real human views been sorted out? If an active reader checks an RSS feed 10x a day that indicates to in my stats there were 10 views, but if I did not write a new entry I doubt any of them were actually looked at by a human.
What are the industry standards for sorting out which of the RSS requests are viewed by a human vs. requested by a machine?
Are people really tracking gifs, javascript or the like to see if reads are occuring (and then there is the case of the IMAP reader above ...) .... Does Feedburner insert tracking elements into their feeds to test viewing?
Another question is unlike a requested webpage I find it very easy to click to see a feed in my feedreader, but not even glance at it before I click to another that I prefer.
RSS item viewing stats are still being developed, but what Feedburner does is insert a transparent 1 pixel gif in the RSS item - which is a good indication of whether the item is being opened (and by extension viewed). I agree, there's a lot of room to innovate in RSS stats. But Feedburner's solution is a pretty good start.
Is there a rss feed for comments?
Blog is a conversation, right?
I use thunderbird can't get a summary view of the post but the whole webpage. Problem is on my side probably. Any suggestion, anyone?