online feed-readers crushing access-stats?

Posted on | June 15, 2006 | No Comments

using them for quite a time, I just recently started thinking about how online feed-readers like bloglines, rojo or the recently gone-beta feeds2 are affecting access-statistics of RSS-feeds. let’s say, 10.000 users of bloglines are subscribed to the digg-feed. chances are high, that the smart engineers of any feed-reader would fetch the original feed only one time to distribute it to all its subscribers, therefor cutting digg’s statistics by 9.999 hits. this could be a potential problem for content-creators with a small- or medium-sized audience, trying to sell the ad-space on their feeds.

ok, bloglines and probably many others publish their total number of subscribers to each feed. in case of techcrunch it’s about 8.000 blogliners, making up about 10% (!) of its whole readership. while feeds with a less tech-savy audience would surely suffer less by syndication-services (honestly, users of such these tend to be geeks – for now!), it still should be considered when calculating the total number of subscribers!

 

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