Library clips

As we all know by now Feedburner have released the 1st on their series on their view of the feed market, what I want to focus on is the 3 types of measuring feed statistics.

It was just the other day the I posted on how do we find out our true subscription number, as people may have subscribed to our feeds, but abandoned their RSS Reader. Is it really a subscription if it isn’t being read…it’s like mail still being sent to you when you have moved house.

Now Feedburner can get to more real numbers by looking at audience engagement measures via active feed loads (views) and feed item clicks (clicks).

NOTE: see the glossary.

Cumulative Subscribers - total times your feed has been subscribed to (MyYahoo! numbers are not included if subscriber has not logged in for 30 days)

NOTE: not sure if this number is provided as the subscriber count seems to be based on views (see below).

Feed items views - number of times your feed has been loaded today (this is real readership).

I think this is moreso if an item has been viewed, as technically your feed items may come from search or re-mixed feeds.

Feed item clicks - feed items that are clicked to read the native blog post
NOTE: I agree with TechCrunch, this means nothing for full-text feeds, as their is no need to click-thru.

But people may click through in order to bookmark your blog post, in this case this leads to another valuable statistic. How many and which of my blog posts are found worthy to be bookmarked, and in which services are they being bookmarked.
Not that this is really Feedburners job, but this would be an interesting statistic. I can get my blog domain URL history at various social bookmark services, but we need a 3rd party to track them all on our behalf.

Also note that Feedburner tracks site statistics.