Topix.net Weblog

October 29, 2004

RSS Usage of Topix.net by Feed Reader

by skrenta at 4:12 AM

We've been measuring on-site vs. off-site story clicks for a while, and have noticed a steady increase in the number of users who are consuming Topix.net newsfeeds via RSS. Taking the last week's logs shows our RSS usage at 12%.

Recently we instrumented our feeds to track story clicks per client. This is a better measure of actual use than simply counting RSS feed fetches, since it measures user clicks on stories in our feeds rather than robot activity.

Client		Usage
Newsgator		29%
Feedster		24%
MyYahoo		20%
Intravnews		4%
Netnewswire		4%
Pluck		3%
Sharpreader		3%
Feedreader		2%
Feeddemon		2%
Firefox		2%
Sunrise		1%

Caveats: this is only measuring Topix.net feed usage, so extrapolation to overall market share is probably not sound. Also, I'm puzzled as to why Bloglines isn't showing up higher in our stats. We have a healthy count of subscribers reported from Bloglines in our server logs, but for some reason they don't seem to click on our feed items very often. My Yahoo's numbers took a big jump when they took their new RSS module out of beta, but have since leveled off somewhat. Technorati doesn't seem to be crawling our feeds, so they're missing from this picture as well.