FeedBurner-numbers explained
a recent post on FeedBurner’s official blog explains some of the service’ inner workings on the basis of TechCrunch’s RSS-feed, which has been breaking the 100.000 subscribers mark a while ago. the article explains characteristics as subscribers and reach and gives insight on the diversified usage of newsreaders (in the case of TechCrunch, there are more than 500 applications out there!). it still doesn’t detail how online-readers like Bloglines or Rojo, proxying feeds for thousands of indiviual users, are taken into account. furthermore, the post announces integration of feed-statistics with classic log-based stats, provided by recently aquired Blogbeat, by the end of 2006.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for checking out the post. You’re right , large aggregators poll differently as noted in this line from the post:
“To illustrate, the popular Web-based aggregator, MyYahoo!, may poll 3 times a day on behalf of thousands of people while the desktop aggregator, FeedDemon polls every half hour on behalf of 1 person”
As far as a more technical explanation for this, large aggregators report their official number of subscribers they are polling on behalf of each time they poll us in the header of the request.
Hope this clarifies it and feel free to drop us a line at feedback@feedburner.com or on our forums at http://forums.feedburner.com (we have a specific stats forum) for more explanations or questions.
Thanks again,
Jessie Chavez
FeedBurner Engineering Team
thx for your comment & thx for pointing out the fact that newsreaders report their reader-numbers back to you - interesting, didn’t know about that!
the forum is really worth a look!