Guestimating blog feed readers

Published on June 17, 2005
By Pete Freitag

I don't have any fancy way of finding out how many people read my RSS feed, but one way of getting a rough idea is by assuming that every reader downloads the feed every hour. From my web stats I can see how many times my rss feed has been downloaded in a month. So assume I had 100,000 hits on my rss feed in 30 days (720 hours):

100,000 / 720 ~= 138 readers

This is pretty rough but it gives me a better metric than 100,000 hits.

FeedBurner actually does a good job of solving this problem. But I want to keep my feed on my server for now.

rss stats analytics

Guestimating blog feed readers was first published on June 17, 2005.

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Comments

Put an image in your feed; I tossed a site-meter image in mine because I'm to lazy to work up my own tracking image; but the concept is simple.

The "image" only gets pulled from your server when someone views your feed in a feed reader. (of course not all will display the image, but most do; especially bloglines).

Check out the stats for my feed image
http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats&site=sm5oneishy

by Jehiah on 06/17/2005 at 5:07:55 PM UTC

Thanks Jehiah, I have thought about doing that, just never got around to it.

by Pete Freitag on 06/17/2005 at 5:15:20 PM UTC

You can use some mod_rewrite voodoo to do the FeedBurner switch transparently. I just wrote about it here:

http://dwlt.net/archives/2005/06/18/UsingFeedBurner

by dwlt on 06/18/2005 at 6:52:22 PM UTC

Whoa.. I hope there's an easier way to get the number of feed readers without using feedburner. :D

by jehzlau on 06/23/2011 at 7:11:05 PM UTC