I wouldn’t have noticed this if it weren’t recurring.

In an otherwise solid article on increasing your RSS readership, John says this about TechCrunch: “They have 30,000+ blog readers and 130,000+ RSS readers.” The RSS part is true, but I can’t figure how did he get the number of 30.000 blog readers? TechCrunch’s traffic numbers are public, and you can easily see that TechCrunch has well over 50.000 daily unique visitors. Before January, TechCrunch averaged about 1.5 million unique hits monthly, which again translates into 50.000 daily uniques - on average.

But prior to this, in an article on Guy Kawasaki’s first year of blogging, John says this: How can a blog with 30,000 readers per day make only $279.00 per month with AdSense? The answer is simple. Over 22,000 readers never visit the blog - they read it by RSS (no Google ads there).

Guy himself claims here that he had an average of 6200 page views per day and about 22500 RSS readers. Page views are useless when determining readership. You want unique visitors, not page views, which can be considerably higher than unique visitors. But, for simplicity’s sake, let’s pretend that Guy meant ‘uniques’ when he said ‘page views’. In this case, John’s numbers are pretty much accurate. But, if you think about these numbers, the conclusions that John drew can be (and probably are) totally wrong.

If you have an average number of 6200 uniques throughout the year, it probably means you started at 0 and climbed up to a number much bigger than 6200, probably around 12.000. The RSS subscriptions number, however, is probably just the latest number of actual subscriptions to Guy’s blog. So, the number of unique visitors and the number of RSS subscriptions are probably much closer than John thought.

Furthermore, even if John’s numbers were correct, the conclusions could still be wrong. If you have 22.000 RSS readers, it doesn’t mean all of them visit your site or even your feed every day. Unique visits to the site, on the other hand, are much more precise, so you can’t really compare them in this way. You can’t say that if someone has 22.000 RSS readers and 6000 unique visits daily that this means that you’re losing 22.000 hits every day because your RSS readers read your blog in their feed readers. This is a huge oversimplification. Some of those RSS readers do visit your blog. Some don’t. Some may have been offline on some days. Unique visitors, on the other hand, are actual visitors to the site.

Add to this that the methods of counting actual RSS subscriptions to your site, according to FeedBurner here and here, are surprisingly vague and mysterious, and I think I can safely conclude that RSS subscriptions to unique visitors are apples to oranges, and that many factors must be considered if you’re going to compare them when writing about monetization of a site.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 at 8:28 am and is filed under Web, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.