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February 01, 2005
RSS Reader Statistics
Feedburner's thoughtful discussion of the state of RSS feed readers illuminates several critical issues. Two of the biggies are a) the growing fragmentation of the RSS reader market and b) the need for standardized measures of circulation.
In January 2005 FeedBurner's top 800 feeds are getting requests from 719 clients, that's up from 409 clients in September 2004. An increase of nearly 80% in the raw reader count in a mere 4 months. This reader fragmentation further exagerates problems for RSS publishers whose feed can suffer from unfriendly formatting in unfamiliar readers.
Perhaps more importantly, the absence of reliab le, industry standard circulation calculations will impede the grow of advertising in RSS. Without a reliable, trusted set of metrics to measure the risk, reach & return on their ad spends, advertisers will stick with standard online media buys.
Posted by charles at February 1, 2005 10:21 PM