September 20, 2005
FeedBurner Aggregate Statistics
It's been a while since we've discussed any broad metrics here, and nature abhors a lack of charts and graphs, so as the leaves begin to turn and the kids head back to school, we thought we'd take a moment to reflect on a couple of interesting statistics.
As you can see from the front page of the FeedBurner Web site, we now manage over 100,000 feeds. The chart below shows feed growth from the time we turned the lights on around here through the end of August.
There are a number of interesting statistics that lie beneath this growth, but one of them really tells the story of a changing media landscape in which more subscribers are consuming more content wherever and whenever they please. The following chart highlights the tremendous growth in the number of subscribers to feeds managed by FeedBurner.
There are a lot of things to say about this chart, not the least of which is "hey, nice chart", and September is on track to continue the accelerated growth. The most important thing to note is that the chart represents the total number of subscriptions served per day. For example, on August 25, we served over 4.1 million subscriptions. You can think of the subscription number as total circulation across all feeds.
Growth is global, and we now count almost 2000 different aggregators and bots polling feeds on behalf of subscribers and other feed services coming from over 190 different country level domains.
The bottom line is that subscribed content is being consumed by more people in more places for more reasons (with liberty and justice for all).
Comments
Congrats guys!
I'd be curious to see how many unique subscribers you are tracking per day. 4.1 million total circulation in one day. I imagine many people subscribe to more than one FeedBurner feed.
congrats dick, steve, eric and team!
I think that we will never find out how many unique subscribers are out there. Like myself many people are subscribed to the same feed in more places (online, software, ...) and that's way we will never get this numbers.
Congrats to FeedBurner Team!
Nice.. those numbers look good!
Can you post the global aggregator distribution?
I'd love see to the graph for aggregators.
Great work - thanks for sharing this information. Thankfully RSS is on an upward curve..... from all angles.
Fergus
I think you would have more subscribers if you better explained your service. It took me about three visits to your website before I understood what you were trying to do - and I was motivated. Imagine how many people happen by your site, don't get it, and leave without subscribing. I think you need to explain the entire thing - RSS/XML, why use these feeds over the ones generated automatically by a person's bloggins software/service. Oh, and PLEASE do not make it a technical feature comparison... tell people about the benefits and explain how a feature might be used. Don't assume they understand the feature.
This is not just a problem I see with feedburner. Tons of sites don't adequately explain what they do and why the average person should give a damn. I mean, how many OSS project pages have you and your users visited and thought, "so what the hell does this thing do?"
John, I might recommend one of the quick start links on the home page that are designed to help you get up and running quickly without a lot of advanced knowledge of feeds or syndication. They are quite detailed and provide step by step instructions. See if that works for you.
Guess I should check your front page more often. I usually only read it through bloglines.
Yes, the "Publishers and Podcasters" link is exactly the type of info I was talking about. I don't think anything like that was there as little as two or three months ago, however. Anyways, thanks for pointing that out.
Great!!!!
Is it possible to get a view of more detailled global statistics?
