Burning Question on RSS Feeds

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds are an XML format that was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the Web. Stephanie Quilao at Back in Skinny Jeans wrote was is still today one of the best and simplest posts to explain how RSS works. She writes: 

Suppose you have 50 sites and blogs that you like to visit regularly. Going to visit each website and blog everyday could take you hours. With RSS, you can “subscribe” to a website or blog, and get “fed” all the new headlines from all of these 50 sites and blogs in one list, and see what’s going on in minutes instead of hours. What a time saver! 

By now, marketers should know that what people are doing with RSS is essentially saying - send me your material. This is not a way to push out content into mail boxes. Strangely enough, I still get that odd and alarming question.

FeedBurner is the service that delivers my RSS feeds. I know of no other general RSS metric and you can see the chicklet displayed on the sidebar of this blog. FeedBurner was acquired by Google last July. While my feeds have grown from to a peak of 1,740, these past several weeks the swings in RSS counts have varied by as many as 400 from one day to another. What is so special about the variance, we might never know. This is worse than mood swings, which is remarkable from a tool run by algorithms.

But as you, like Mr. Slee, wonder what your mysterious butler Mr. Google is up to, you're in for a surprise:

But Mr. Google did not attack me with a knife, or bite me in the neck. Nothing so dramatic. He simply looked over at my scribbled notes and sighed a world-weary sigh.
- You don't understand do you sir?
- What do you mean Google? I understand everything now.
- Really? This document here? And what does that matter if no one reads it? And who decides whether anyone can come here to view it? Exactly how do you propose to publicize your absurd opinions if not through me?

More a master than a servant concludes the tale [hat tip to Nick Carr]. Technorati was so last year. Today it's FeedBurner, in all its mystery.

Comments

[William Tully]

"Exactly how do you propose to publicize your absurd opinions if not through me" - Every single blog comes with a default RSS feed. We all got into bed with FeedBurner by choosing to, and at that point we agreed to provide our feeds for them to advertise in, in return for some free analytics.

The reality is that it is all about traffic and advertising - why wouldn't google want to acquire FB? There is significant traffic, and it's a way they can control advertising - unlike on sites where people have a choice of which advertising they wish to partner with. If google was to mess with the service (ie. impose limits), it would not help their advertising revenue, and it would likely be days before another free service popped up looking to service the needs of bloggers.

If anything I see FB service improving so that google can provide more ads in increased traffic. It isn't about google trying to control what we publish (that's up to governments), no, google just wants their ads in as much traffic flow as possible. Keep up the service we know and love, and we'll agree to keep using it so that you can place ads in the feeds. Don't see how it hinders what each of us is trying to accomplish with our blogs..

[Mario Vellandi]

The basic service + add-on upgrades is a viable subsidiary business model for Google. This is a direction I think they'll take; while giving us free value, they could be slowly brewing potential services behind the scenes, that just aren't market-ready yet (remarkable & good value).

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Tully - that sounds great. And remember it's April 1. Now if only I could *believe* the numbers I see, we would all be peachy. With such a swing, the numbers are not reliable. Not a hindrance, just another metric that does not make sense.

@Mario - again, it would all sound great if it weren't for the wild swings. Why is the number going down when more and more people are subscribing? As for the model, hey more power to them, literally.

[Marshall Sponder]

One thing that's happened since around the time Google acquired Feedburner is the addition of all Google's traffic (IE: from Google Reader and iGoogle) to the Feedburner Stats.

When this was first done (early last year), most sites on using Feedburner saw jumps in the number of RSS Subscribers amounting to an additional 25%-40%. That was Great.

Well, wait a second ..... not always so great. Why? On occasion, and more so lately, Google's backend processing is late and the "Google RSS Traffic" might not get updated every single day - sometimes, there's been problems and it's not updated for a few days - and that is the main cause of the fluctuation in RSS Feed Numbers.

I found this out from Vanessa Fox, who used work for Google as a programmer for Google Webmaster Tools.

These days, RSS Feeds have become more important - as a way to evaluate the quality of your content and branding - and it's unfortunate - that when we get all this "free stuff' from Google - we occasionally have to also get the other side of "free" ... that we stuck with services like Feedburner that have become less reliable - as they've been put into the Google Infrastructure and their production made to align with the rest of what Google does.

Hope that helps - good post.

[Valeria Maltoni]

Marshall, thank you for the explanation. When I do not understand something - when it does not make sense as in following a predictable pattern (promise), I stop believing in it (credibility and reputation). Google is not in the habit of communicating to its customers, I realize. They are very Web 1.0 when it comes to that. As they grow and expand the empire, they might rethink that policy a little.

Give a little to get a little. There's also something to be said for setting expectations - it impacts value and worth.

[Richard Becker]

Valeria,

I have yet to find a public analytic tool that is truly valid and even the private ones don't always measure up. (They are useful and meaningless at the same time. Ha.)

At the end of the day, I truly believe we have to rely on our own research. Did our opinion, experience, engagement, or call to action accomplish something tangible. Someday, probably not. Other days, maybe so. And does what we do on any given day set the bar for someone else with a different intent? Not really.

Didn't Bukowski say something along the lines that when we write to numbers, our writing becomes meaningless anyway? Sure, it's a little different for businesses, but for the average Op-ed, not do different, I think.

You nail the idea that Google could improve its communication practices. I've noticed some improvement through Blogger. Perhaps its a sign that even when they are not talking, they are at least listening.

Best,
Rich

[Valeria Maltoni]

Useful and meaningless just about describes many of these tools. I do wonder if social media consultants are selling the idea of measuring through them to companies. We have Omniture behind our Web site - I know, web sites are *so* 1998 ;-) But they can work.

Well, many read my posts, I see them quoted and linked. That is better feedback than nothing, but I do prefer - how can I say this? - conversation. That's where we all learn the most.

Communication is not soft. It's a must.

[Roger von Oech]

The only number I care about is my Google Page Rank (PR) number.

The RSS subscription # was fun to display for awhile, but lately it kept jumping around so much (and even during the day), that I found it to be an unreliable indicator of anything. So I just removed it. My subscribers still receive my feed and that's the point, isn't it?

[Valeria Maltoni]

Well, since Google just downgraded my blog from PR6 to PR4 for no reason I can figure out, I stopped caring about that, too. I stopped caring about Google entirely. Search words are so yesterday. Looking forward to open search and context. Maybe content will do better there.

[Mack Collier]

In my experience, when the numbers suddenly dip for a day or two, it's because FeedBurner didn't count the totals from one of the feed readers, such as Bloglines or Netvibes (or Google Reader, whups!), for whatever reason. It seems to happen all the time but usually corrects itself in a day or two, at least for me.

[Carolyn Ann]

I've got this strong desire to be quite imperious: "once upon a time, when I attended a class at MIT", etc. (I actually did attend a summer course at MIT! But it was a long time ago, and I'm sure my mental acuity has diminished since those heady days...)

Google's Analytics tell only part of the story re readership; As far as I know, no one has ever sat down and studied network, blog and so on, traffic in a manner that does it justice. Some have tried to explain readership variation in technical terms; some have explained it in terms that indicate a less than comprehensible (er, complete?) understanding of the subject. (I have another term for that, but it's not nice.)

If we say "this is an application" - so that Valeria's wonderful words become the application, and then ask "how many read it?" at any given moment, track that readership over a certain (and useful) period of time - we'll end up with something that describes how network traffic works.

There will be a busy period - it'll be approximately a few hours long; this will be followed by a period of inactivity, and then another smaller burst of demand. Afterwards, once most people are ensconced in their apartments (there's a reason I make that assumption), there will be another small burst of readership - aka "traffic".

(The reason being that readers with kids, will more than likely be doing different things to the single, or married-no-kids group.)

This will, without a shadow of doubt, define - not follow - some pattern in human behavior. Other activities can be defined around Valeria's readers; likewise, their reading of Valeria's blog can be predicted based upon their other activities. I'd guess that some will head to Valeria's blog as one of their morning routines; others will read it after lunch. Still others, when they get home Obvious, right? Except, if you know a little about your audience - you can target them for your marketing, depending on what time they read. (Google, for all it's wonders, still hasn't figured this one out. I've often said that when you hire only the "brilliant", you end up with a competent, but extremely dumb, organization.)

Anyway, in telephony, this is all measured in "Erlangs" (which happens to be the name of really neat programming language; and also the last name of some guy who had the wit to figure out how to measure network traffic. It's more the pity that no one figured out to how to tell the computer network guys about his work. (I tried; but have you ever tried to tell a room, full of geeks who know how the world works - despite their own impressions - that their latest "innovation" was thought of, about 50 years ago?)

(Tongue firmly in cheek) Once marketing figures out that they can tune a campaign to Erlang measurements - watch out! :-) You can - you just have to know what an Erlang is.

(If you're on a Mac, you're in luck: simply head to Wikipedia. Everyone else, on Windows machines, you'll have to arduously type in the wikipedia address, and then query for "Erlang". :-) )

The simple version: think of how TV ads are placed.

Oh, Valeria: if you have a variance of about 400, per day, it simply means that 400 people are out (or otherwise not available) on any particular day. Which, oddly enough, sounds about right.

Imperiously, :-)
Carolyn Ann

[Marc Garnaut]

I wonder if I get counted in your total Valeria... and if not then I guess I'm proof that the number is more of a very big ballpark than something that should be relied on as anything approaching an accurate headcount. I route all my RSS feeds, whether Feedburner or not, through Feedblitz and receive them as a consolidated daily email.
=) Marc

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Mack - the mood swings have been like a roller coaster lately. I wonder if they will arbitrarily take chunks out. Arbitrary seems to suit Web 1.0 ;-)

@Carolyn Ann - beautiful, I learned something new I will need to investigate - Erlang. Of course, intuitively I have been operating that way my whole career. But the boss du jour always insists on data and facts. In many instances I found that truth trumps facts. So there. Strangely enough, my number today seems to be back on the track it left weeks ago. Go figure! Agencies are not the only ones guilty of "not invented here" I could make a long list, but I promised that I would do no evil :D

[Valeria Maltoni]

Welcome back, Marc. The world is not flat when it comes to counts. To follow your excellent example, I know of many people who forward their email subscription to my posts around the office, or to their friends on a pretty regular basis. Are those readers?

My point was really not about headcount - although I like to remember everyone who reads and comments - it was about the accuracy of metrics that are being sold as part of the social media "package". Hmmm, now I do wonder if Google analytics for SEM are captured correctly.

[Roger von Oech]

@V: "since Google just downgraded my blog from PR6 to PR4 for no reason I can figure out,"

Google redid their Page Rank algorithm about two months ago. Seems like almost sites went down by one — so it's all about the same.

I like PR because the great majority of my visits come from search queries. The greater the PR, the likelier a site is to be on page one of search results.

Good luck to all.

[ifmarch]

Hi, RSS now on becoming a important appl.