This is really interesting and incredibly helpful just for context. In the last few days I have been very curious about these questions as I just started my blog and was curious how some of my ratios compared to others.
One other statistic which I am curious about is your RSS conversion rate. I started my blog in january and over the first 3 months I have about 380 subscribers and I have about 36000 unique visitors over that period of time. Both in the aggregate, and month to month my conversion rate to RSS is about 1%. I am curious if yours is similar now, or has been in the past. Is that a statistic that anyone cares about or tracks? Perhaps I am over estimating the significance of RSS readership but it seems to me that understanding what typical conversions are and what effects it could be really useful.
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
Feedburner says I have approx 120k feed subs but I think most of them are either bogus or inactive. Feed subs is sort of irrelevant. I care much more about the "daily reach" of my feed
The 'daily reach' according to feedburner is around 4000 unique viewers of my feed. That is about equal to the number of unique visitors each day to this blog
So what that means is half the audience reads this blog here and half reads it somewhere else
If you don't use feedburner, I highly recommend it
Fred
Hank Williams
· 1 year ago
Thanks. I do use feedburner, and it is indeed helpful. I guess my blog is new enough that the daily reach and the subscriber numbers are pretty close and at this point I dont think I have almost any bogus subs. Currently the number of daily readers is much higher than my subscribers or reach. I guess over time it sounds like that dynamic will change. What I was trying to figure out is are there metrics for how many "conversions" one can typically expect out of a batch of uniques that will become subscribers. My *tiny* sample suggests in my case about 1%, which I am pretty happy with. But I was just curious if that was good or bad my comparison. It probably depends on where you are in the lifecycle of your blog too I would guess.
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
Exactly
Adam Wride
· 1 year ago
Once again, Google shows they are the biggest game in town.
chartreuse
· 1 year ago
i knew rss readers were over-rated... :)
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
Everything is overrated unless it's unknown
chartreuse
· 1 year ago
i was one of those folks completely confused by rss. the words involved were too long (aggregator) and completely foreign.
Now Reddit I love. It's (unfortunately) what I am reading while all my friend are on Techmeme. I remember when Reddit was bought by Conde Nast a couple of ears ago for a song. As a long time user of it it seems they didn't touch it at all (except to slap some unobtrusive ads on it).
But back to th topic at hand. I think its cool that you let people know this stuff.
It's interesting.
I am currently working with a fairly large site and we were discussing their stats. I advised them to open their stats up to everyone.
They freaked and talked about stuff like competition knowing, etc. My answer was the standard "So?".
They didn't have a reply. From now on I will use the line I heard waiting for the train today. "Don't be scared. Be scary."
I know you didn't post this stuff to scare people but being open is surely more interesting. A great read.
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
That's a great line
I can't think of one time in the past fice years where I've regretted being open
Fred
Robert Seidman
· 1 year ago
That is a great line and it's true, but you're not making (the bulk of) your money via advertising on your blog.
I had some e-mail correspondence recently with some folks about NewTeeVee.Com's page view traffic because I could see it via Quantcast. The result of that seems to be that Quantcast now only has that level of detail for all of the GigaOm empire rolled up (as opposed to pageview detail on the individual sites). So it's still "open", but not as granular.
The interesting info is actually in the details sometimes.. But, I don't blame GigaOm at ALL for making that change. Nor would I expect you to post your pageview detail or pages per visit simply because I'm curious, but it wouldn't break my heart if you "Quantified" your blog leaving it all open to anyone who cares to look! They also have a way to report feed stats as well, though I've never played around with it.
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
Quantcast's data sucks. It makes no sense to me. I prefer google analytics, sitemeter, feedburner, even alexa if you can believe it
Robert Seidman
· 1 year ago
Hmmm. I think it depends on whether you're "quantified" or not. If you're not, (which you're not) and they are relying on panel data, yeah, at least for the smaller sites, the panel data does seem to suck (but I imagine that's true on almost any panel).
But if you're Quantified, at least on a visits, unique, and pageview basis, Quantcast tracks almost exactly with GA. It tracks at least as closely as feedburner does. I don't love the presentation of it's demographic data but for measuring the traffic itself, it's very good.
I'll grant there are some presentation/UI issues, but if you look at daily traffic (instead of 30 day or 7 day trends), it's pretty spot-on.To compare it to Alexa for a site that actually is quantified is insulting.
It's definitely NOT better than GA for the person running the site (but it's not trying to be that) because it doesn't list all the referral, keyword, and wealth of reports available on GA, but in terms of making your traffic stats totally open, if that's really what you're of a mind to do, it's great.
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
I had the quantcast tag on my page for about a year and I took it off maybe six months ago because the data made no sense to me. Maybe I was doing something wrong. I have a link to my sitemeter stats on the left rail of my blog. That seems to work fine for me and others. all of gawker media stats are shown that way on nick denton's blog
Good Article. You get one thing wrong though imo. All the traffic sent to you through GoogleReader does not only come from your own subscribers but also from people subscribed to tc, rww and the likes and clicking on a link to you in one of their articles. So, to sum this up, you don't really know and will never know how much traffic these techblogs with an rss-affine audience really do send you. :)
Dan Kantor
· 1 year ago
Since you put the entire post in the RSS feed, it probably means that most of the RSS audience never clicks over. This is as opposed to techmeme, del.icio.us, reddit where only a portion of the post or only the link is there. I read your blog inside Bloglines and almost never click over.
There are still a few blogs out there (chartreuse) that don't put full posts in their feeds. I've stopped reading them as they don't fit into my consumption experience which is increasingly through the iPhone (Bloglines has a great iPhone site)
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
I agree. Full posts in feeds is the way to go. You can monetize via feedburner
Fred
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
Excellent point
Thanks
Fred
Jauder Ho
· 1 year ago
Fred,
If you could post your stats breakdown from FeedBurner, that would be interesting to see and compare.
fakedjs
· 1 year ago
I still use NetNewsWire as my aggregator. I like it because it's a separate application like an iTunes. However, still waiting for the Joost online browser-that's a program I prefer not to deploy a separate app.
John Furrier
· 1 year ago
Fred, What were your total unique visits? You mention page views but how about sharing the unqiue number? I'll share mine if you share yours.
Thanks john
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
Around 75k per month last time I checked plus whatever the uniques are that read my feed and don't come to this page (like dan who left a comment earlier)
Fred
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
i just checked google and it was 83k for the past 30 days
John Furrier
· 1 year ago
Thanks Fred. I'm a man of my word :-)
furrier.org blog did 18k uniques for the qtr around 6.5k per month ... i have no idea how many subscribers are hitting the feed.
Offbeatmammal
· 1 year ago
it's amazing how fast FriendFeed has grown as a referrer, almost catching up Twitter (and I suspect mostly at the expense of Twitter)
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
That's not what my data shows
Offbeatmammal
· 1 year ago
that's good new because it means FriendFeed is (I guess) introducing a new audience to the social networking world. digging into my (much, much) smaller pool of data actually bears that out... I have FriendFeed followers who are not Twitter followers... they came from Facebook. Kinda comforting to see it's NOT a zero sum game as I first suspected it might be
DonRyan
· 1 year ago
Google Analytics= Nerd Porn (I mean this in the best possible way!)
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
So true. And office safe too
howardlindzon
· 1 year ago
Have you read "The Open Kamona' by Seymour Hair :) . Oy.
RacerRick
· 1 year ago
Love to see your top 10 from "network location".
howardlindzon
· 1 year ago
I am interested to see the relationship between Feedburner subscribers and Twitter Followers for any correlation as to early adoption and success. For instance, I liked reading Gaping Void dude for a time, until he twittered and once I saw how he twittered I lost interwst in everything he did. I think some people are meant to twitter, some blog, some both and some just to read :)
To start this conversation off I have 3400 feedburner subscribers and 530 or so twitter followers for a ratio of 6 ish to 1. I like twittering better for finance and blogging now for other stuff.
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
Howard
The problem with feedburner subs is they get stale. I have 115,000 feedburner subs. And yet when my subs were 15,000 the daily reach of my feed was around 2,000. Now its about 4,000. So my feed readers have doubled and yet my subs have gone up 8x
The feed sub number is like the facebook installed apps number. Basically useless
Fred
ppearlman
· 1 year ago
a concrete example of how much deterioration my.yahoo has experienced over the course of only one year at the expense of iggogle et al...
obbop
· 1 year ago
The vast majority of my traffic comes from festish sex porn sites that cater to midgets, tri-sexuals and fixations with small furry mammals.
I don't understand this at all.
My site is geared towards conservative Republican values.
fredwilson
· 1 year ago
Best comment of the day!
M Sharma
· 1 year ago
Fred - great post. I have a theory about why blogs of similar interest like techcrunch do not generate that much traffic to your blog. The explanation might lie in the similarity.
Since I am interested in Technology, Entrepreneurship, and VC, I am subscribed to most of the usual suspects like GigaOm, TC, your blog, etc, and go through them via Google reader. If I find a link to one of your posts on, say TC - there are a couple of possibilities why I might not click that link:
1. I have already read the post 2. I will get to your blog and read the post as I make my way through the subscriptions
Just a thought - perhaps this is deflating the number of referrals from sites that appeal to the same target audience.
All Comments
One other statistic which I am curious about is your RSS conversion rate. I started my blog in january and over the first 3 months I have about 380 subscribers and I have about 36000 unique visitors over that period of time. Both in the aggregate, and month to month my conversion rate to RSS is about 1%. I am curious if yours is similar now, or has been in the past. Is that a statistic that anyone cares about or tracks? Perhaps I am over estimating the significance of RSS readership but it seems to me that understanding what typical conversions are and what effects it could be really useful.
The 'daily reach' according to feedburner is around 4000 unique viewers of my feed. That is about equal to the number of unique visitors each day to this blog
So what that means is half the audience reads this blog here and half reads it somewhere else
If you don't use feedburner, I highly recommend it
Fred
new enough that the daily reach and the subscriber numbers are pretty close
and at this point I dont think I have almost any bogus subs. Currently the
number of daily readers is much higher than my subscribers or reach. I guess
over time it sounds like that dynamic will change. What I was trying to
figure out is are there metrics for how many "conversions" one can typically
expect out of a batch of uniques that will become subscribers. My *tiny*
sample suggests in my case about 1%, which I am pretty happy with. But I was
just curious if that was good or bad my comparison. It probably depends on
where you are in the lifecycle of your blog too I would guess.
Now Reddit I love. It's (unfortunately) what I am reading while all my friend are on Techmeme. I remember when Reddit was bought by Conde Nast a couple of ears ago for a song. As a long time user of it it seems they didn't touch it at all (except to slap some unobtrusive ads on it).
But back to th topic at hand. I think its cool that you let people know this stuff.
It's interesting.
I am currently working with a fairly large site and we were discussing their stats. I advised them to open their stats up to everyone.
They freaked and talked about stuff like competition knowing, etc. My answer was the standard "So?".
They didn't have a reply. From now on I will use the line I heard waiting for the train today. "Don't be scared. Be scary."
I know you didn't post this stuff to scare people but being open is surely more interesting. A great read.
I can't think of one time in the past fice years where I've regretted being open
Fred
I had some e-mail correspondence recently with some folks about NewTeeVee.Com's page view traffic because I could see it via Quantcast. The result of that seems to be that Quantcast now only has that level of detail for all of the GigaOm empire rolled up (as opposed to pageview detail on the individual sites). So it's still "open", but not as granular.
The interesting info is actually in the details sometimes.. But, I don't blame GigaOm at ALL for making that change. Nor would I expect you to post your pageview detail or pages per visit simply because I'm curious, but it wouldn't break my heart if you "Quantified" your blog leaving it all open to anyone who cares to look! They also have a way to report feed stats as well, though I've never played around with it.
But if you're Quantified, at least on a visits, unique, and pageview basis, Quantcast tracks almost exactly with GA. It tracks at least as closely as feedburner does. I don't love the presentation of it's demographic data but for measuring the traffic itself, it's very good.
I'll grant there are some presentation/UI issues, but if you look at daily traffic (instead of 30 day or 7 day trends), it's pretty spot-on.To compare it to Alexa for a site that actually is quantified is insulting.
It's definitely NOT better than GA for the person running the site (but it's not trying to be that) because it doesn't list all the referral, keyword, and wealth of reports available on GA, but in terms of making your traffic stats totally open, if that's really what you're of a mind to do, it's great.
six months ago because the data made no sense to me. Maybe I was doing
something wrong. I have a link to my sitemeter stats on the left rail of my
blog. That seems to work fine for me and others. all of gawker media stats
are shown that way on nick denton's blog
http://www.nickdenton.org/002013.html
So, to sum this up, you don't really know and will never know how much traffic these techblogs with an rss-affine audience really do send you. :)
This is not to say you should put partial posts in the feeds. Techdirt has a good explanation why full posts actually increase pageviews - http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070813/01433...
There are still a few blogs out there (chartreuse) that don't put full posts in their feeds. I've stopped reading them as they don't fit into my consumption experience which is increasingly through the iPhone (Bloglines has a great iPhone site)
Fred
Thanks
Fred
If you could post your stats breakdown from FeedBurner, that would be interesting to see and compare.
What were your total unique visits? You mention page views but how about sharing the unqiue number? I'll share mine if you share yours.
Thanks
john
Fred
furrier.org blog did 18k uniques for the qtr around 6.5k per month ... i have no idea how many subscribers are hitting the feed.
digging into my (much, much) smaller pool of data actually bears that out... I have FriendFeed followers who are not Twitter followers... they came from Facebook.
Kinda comforting to see it's NOT a zero sum game as I first suspected it might be
To start this conversation off I have 3400 feedburner subscribers and 530 or so twitter followers for a ratio of 6 ish to 1. I like twittering better for finance and blogging now for other stuff.
The problem with feedburner subs is they get stale. I have 115,000 feedburner subs. And yet when my subs were 15,000 the daily reach of my feed was around 2,000. Now its about 4,000. So my feed readers have doubled and yet my subs have gone up 8x
The feed sub number is like the facebook installed apps number. Basically useless
Fred
I don't understand this at all.
My site is geared towards conservative Republican values.
Since I am interested in Technology, Entrepreneurship, and VC, I am subscribed to most of the usual suspects like GigaOm, TC, your blog, etc, and go through them via Google reader. If I find a link to one of your posts on, say TC - there are a couple of possibilities why I might not click that link:
1. I have already read the post
2. I will get to your blog and read the post as I make my way through the subscriptions
Just a thought - perhaps this is deflating the number of referrals from sites that appeal to the same target audience.