Improved Statistics on the Way

In the few months since we announced our first pre-release, we have gathered a tremendous amount of information about the way feeds are accessed by aggregators and feed readers. Feeds are accessed frequently by bots, by feed readers that are set up to ping the feed for updates every 10 minutes (or even more frequently), and there are an extraordinary number of requests made by programs that don't pass anything along in the user-agent field of the HTTP request, making it hard to tell what, exactly, is behind thost particular requests.

Our first thought on reporting new visitors was a simple "we'll report the number of HTTP requests that are asking for the feed for the first time". This proves to be an inappropriate measure of "new viewers" for a lot of reasons, including the existence of clients that just ask for the whole feed every time as if it was the first request. After a lot of hard work here, we are close to releasing our next evolution of feed subscriber statistics. We will highlight the distinctions between bot hits, browser hits (people clicking on the little "XML" icon on your web page), and feed aggregator/reader hits. We will further highlight for our publishers things we know about particular access patterns that are throwing off your subscriber count. For example, there are feed aggregators that do not pass along the number of subscribers for whom the feed is being accessed. In these cases, your subscriber statistics will be under-measured, as the feed request may have been on behalf of one or one hundred subscribers.

On a final note, it's very interesting to see how FeedBurner is evolving. As our number of publishers is growing exponentially, we are seeing a desire for a number of enhancements to SmartFeed™. We have a very large number of European publishers whose subscribers frequently access the feeds from mobile phones, and those publishers would like to see SmartFeed distinguish between mobile readers and desktop readers, stripping down the mobile feed appropriately. Our first priority right now is to release our next evolution of statistics, and then we'll be turning our attention to new services and a more sophisticated SmartFeed.

We will be updating our statistics pages in the very near future. As always in software development, we need to find that balance between design satisfaction, sufficient testing, and getting improved capabilities out to our users. Most importantly, we hear what our publishers need, and we're going to get it to them quickly.