One thing I’ve wondered for a while is how large my total readership actually is. Well, I found an answer in Google analytics, which I started using last month. Now that I have a month’s worth of data:
This blog has 6857 regular readers
Wow! More than I would have imagined. I put my cutoff at number of visitors who visited at least 15 times in the last month. Thanks to all who read, especially my hard core visitors who visit more than 100 times a month, which total about 728.
Huhhh, I never even knew analytics had that feature. Cool.
According to this, I’ve got about 12,000 who visit at least 30 times a month, and 7000 more than 200 times.
Way better metrics than sitemeter; and great statistics; I jsut wish they gave us more detail.
This means the gun blogosphere reaching considerably more people than I imagined before.
I use it too, but I don’t know of any way to track people that suck down the RSS feed.
There isn’t.
I hope it doesn’t count page views as visits.
You probably could detect how many people use the RSS feed. Turn it off, then watch for a spike in traffic as the check the main page. Subtract the spike from the daily average.
Or a tracking image could be put into one post and the RSS readers will pick it up (unless they are plain text users).
Or perhaps the server log records how many times the RSS file is accessed.
Or, I’ve heard a unique URL could be generated for each subscription request (I’m not sure how well it would work in practice, though).
I mostly read you via rssfeed. And then follow the link if I want to comment.
Likewise. It’s actually one of the reasons that I resisted using RSS for a long time (and still don’t use it for reading comics, though since switching to RSS I do that less).
Being argumentative in comments probably brings me back up though :)
Ditto on the RSS feed. That’s how I read and I only click over to the actual post to comment.
Speaking solely for myself (but I can’t be the only one) I wouldn’t recommend doing anything to make using an RSS feed reader more difficult. I read too many blogs every day to keep up if I can’t read through the reader. Therefore, I don’t read blogs that only provide summaries because I’d have to click over to their blog every day to ge the full posts. Takes too much time. I miss some good blogs that way, but if I didn’t do that, I’d be reading all day and wouldn’t have time for work. Not a terribly distasteful idea, but I’d get pretty hungry after a while. I suppose after the power company shuts the electricity off, I’d be brought back to the real world and be forced to do some work to get them paid.
Anyway. I don’t know if anyone else out there is like me, but if I can’t read the posts through my reader, I just don’t read the blog. Any truly significant posts will get linked by someone else that I do read and I’ll just click over to read those really important ones.
‘course, I comment on your posts so often that I probably was counted as a “regular” anyway.
I read everyone through RSS as well, and have more blogs on my feed than I can possibly read. I miss a lot of shit these days, which is sad. There’s just no way I could handle even 1/10th as many blogs as I have on my feed if I had to read manually.
Anyone with Instapundit in their feed drinks from the firehose :) (Guilty of that myself).
Dealing with the RSS calculation is a bear. Do hits on the RSS file(s) count in their calculations? If so, you’re going to get a roughly fixed number of hits per day per RSS reader. If those hits don’t count, then you get no indication of, er, reader readers.
Complicating things further still are those that read through an aggregator. That will be a single hit, but may actually feed any number of subscribers.
At any rate, it’s a shot in the dark trying to figure out how many actual visitors you have. But it’s obvious you’ve got a lot, so congratulations!
Happy to add to your traffic. I visit at least once a day. The RSS feature on Firefox provides links, but not text, so if I see a new posting I have to click and visit in order to read it. At work I have IE and massively redundant firewalls, filters, restrictions and crap so I can’t use RSS.
R.E. Site feeds, bloglines tells you how many subscribers.
google sitemaps tells you how many google reader subscribers you have.
i think among those two i have about 300.
Might have to give analytics a tryl