Counting feed subscribers

[Mike Orr]

Now that I have RSS/Atom newsfeeds set up, managers are asking how
many subscribers are there? Is there any way to calculate that? My
first thought was to count up the number of feed hits vs home page
hits, but that's bogus because it would include every feed update,
which is done whenever the user agent feels like it. Counting by
unique session IDs would also be bogus because each update is a
different session. Counting by unique IPs is bogus due to
network-address translation. Our privacy policy does not allow
persistent user IDs.

The only thing I can think of is to put a random number in a query
parameter when generating feed URLs. Then the number of active feeds
each month would be the count of unique feed numbers. Or is there a
better way?

--
Mike Orr <slugg...@gmail.com>

[Jonathan Vanasco]

Wouldn't the "random number in a query parameter" be a persistent user
id ?

The only think i can think of, that would be truly non-persistent-id ,
would be to use some sort of redirect or cookie...

1- All links to subscribe / read go to "rss:a"
2- If "rss:a" sees a non-unique cookie "seen=1", it redirects to
"rss:b" / or displays the content
3- if it doesn't see the cookie, it sets one... logs it... then does
the redirect/display

I'm not sure how rss cookies work... it seems like some use systems
describe HTTP cookies , others use url-encoded strings

If the privacy policy allows it, the method you thought of would
probably be ideal. If not, I'd push for a privacy policy change --
you should be able to persist a random identifier , like any of the
analytics suites out there do. i believe that's what feedburner and
feedblitz do too

[Damjan]

> The only thing I can think of is to put a random number in a query
> parameter when generating feed URLs.  Then the number of active feeds
> each month would be the count of unique feed numbers. Or is there a
> better way?

route them through feedburner? :)