My Yahoo Subscriber Numbers

After publishing our initial RSS market share findings a couple of weeks ago, we received a number of emails from publishers and other interested parties cross-checking our numbers and asking for further detail on our report. A number of these emails asked us to look into supposed anomalies, and we have followed up on all of these requests. As we double checked inquiries against our statistics, we repeatedly found that our numbers accurately reflected the data we were processing, but there was one particular issue that concerned us. Following up on several specific requests from publishers regarding the My Yahoo service, we discovered that several of the feeds for which Yahoo was reporting a very small number of subscribers were seeing a disproportionate number of clickthroughs from different IP addresses. Note that the we are not saying disproportionate as regards other RSS clients, since My Yahoo will obviously have a larger ratio of clickthroughs due to the way it displays feed titles (or title and short summary) only. Rather, we found several instances in which My Yahoo would request a feed on behalf of only a few subscribers, but further investigation would reveal that there had been 30 or 40 clickthroughs from different IP addresses in a single 24 hour period with a My Yahoo referrer. There were obviously more than 3 subscribers to this feed at My Yahoo.

We then analyzed the week to week growth in subscriber numbers across RSS clients, and found that Yahoo's growth for a number of our top 100 feeds was negligible while every other reader in the top 20 had grown at a rate of at least a couple percent. We began to work with the My Yahoo team, asking them about the numbers we were seeing. My Yahoo was extremely responsive, and they discovered a bug that had caused them to send outdated subscriber numbers for some time. They fixed the bug, and we are now seeing subscriber numbers from My Yahoo that map much more accurately to clickthrough referrers across feeds. As a result, many of our publishers will see a jump in their circulation numbers as of January 19 or 20 above and beyond natural day to day growth.

It's interesting to note that Yahoo's stats are based on active users in the last 30 days. So, if your stats show 100 users from My Yahoo, that means that 100 users have seen your feed within the last 30 days. This may be in contrast to other services that report the total number of people that have ever subscribed to your feed, whether or not they have visited or read your feed recently.

The correction clearly affects the total market share numbers. As we publish additional statistics and metrics about the RSS market, we will note the adjustment in the Yahoo numbers and call those out in any charts such that they aren�t taken out of context elsewhere.

This all leads us to a couple of related points. We are certainly not going to focus solely on RSS clients in our reports. That is only one view of this emerging market, and there are lots of other interesting data: the growth of podcasting, penetration of mobile feed readers, geographic market growth, and more. In all these cases, we are observing interesting trends that would likely be helpful to the broader market. We published the market share statistics saying explicitly that transparency can only help the discussion. It has quickly helped our publishers get a more accurate measure of subscriber counts.