RSS winning over HTML

March 13, 2004 by Jeff Jarvis

RSS winning over HTML
: I just noted (thanks to a lunch question from Ed Sim) that my RSS is getting more traffic than my home page.

That’s a big deal.

  • Ed

    Dumb question, but how can you distinguish between RSS traffic and web page traffic? Inquiring minds want to know.

  • http://brian.carnell.com/ Brian Carnell

    More importantly, why is it a big deal? RSS aggregators are pulling his RSS feed automatically every X minutes, so it’s hardly surprising that RSS traffic exceeds HTML traffic.

  • http://www.joelblain.com Joel

    good point. It only makes sense that RSS traffic would be much higher.

  • http://www.gapingvoid.com hugh macleod

    According to my stat meter, I got 5.2 million hits this month alone. I’m sure it must be RSS or something really sick with my traffic counter.

  • http://www.adrants.com Steve Hall

    Hugh…that could be individual file requests (instead of pages) which on your site with all those cartoon images would naturally be a high number. My rss file gets called far more than my index file but that is partially dues to newsreaders “tapping” it all the time to see if it has changed. It’s hard to get a count of just the people who are reading your rss versus those “taps”

  • button

    What #1 Ed said.
    Ever since I enabled Atom, my traffic has been reduced by about one third on my meter.
    How can I find the RSS readership measurement?
    I wonder if my lost readership converted to Atom or what has happened to them.

  • Matt

    “My rss file gets called far more than my index file but that is partially dues to newsreaders ‘tapping’ it all the time to see if it has changed.”
    Yup – that’s what it is. My readers hits sites probably more than 30 times a day. Multiply that by however many people are subbed and there you go.

  • Joshua

    Can’t you see unique visits to your RSS page, as opposed to simply hit counting? That would eliminate the surge resulting from single News Aggregator’s making multiple requests.
    Also, it makes a big difference for me as a reader via News Aggregator that BuzzMachine provides full RSS feeds and not excerpts. I keep writing to the other sites I read that only supply excerpts asking them to change this. I guess the logic is that providing excerpts as a teaser will bring people to your site (where they can presumably click on your ads). But its truly frustrating that sites like DailyKos provide excerpts of only the first 10 words of a post in their RSS feed!