[Web4lib] RSS Subscription Stats?

[K.G. Schneider]

When this comes up I get excited, believing someone out there has The
Answer. We all know the question comes from the desire to know, so how many
people are reading the feed?

Anyhoo... wearing my work hat... what we do at Librarians' Internet Index
(http://lii.org ) is track hits to the RSS file over time, and track
Bloglines subscribers over time. Obviously, the latter is merely a sampling,
and one skewed because we promote Bloglines from our own site as an easy,
free, web-based blog reading tool (aka aggregator). But we're now
approaching 12,000 Bloglines subscribers, with a pickup of between 200 and
400 users per week, and however you parse it, that's nice.  

What I find interesting is that our email subscriptions were stagnant or
sliding for a year (despite brisk additions and removals to the list), but
now email subscribers are climbing as well. When we migrated to our new
site, we added an enhanced, prettified, feature-rich version (an HTML
version, what we call "colorized"), but I'm not really sure where the growth
is what with folks shifting from one version to the other or shifting to RSS
or shifting back. We do have some underlying data but it would take some
work to tease all that out. The key thing is that subscriptions and site
usage are both going up, and given the hits to the feed and the subscription
patterns, I believe that the two are related. I luv RSS, but if people luv
our email newsletters, that's cool too. 

Karen G. Schneider