Feed Stats Now Live

We've got a little bit of a surprise for you this Friday. For the past month or so we've been tracking traffic to your RSS feeds just like we track stats for your normal pages.

Now RSS feeds are a little tricky, because even though they may get 3-5 times the amount of raw traffic that your normal blogs, it's often aggregators that check the feed every 30 minutes or hour automatically. So the real metric for feeds is subscribers, or an idea of how many people are tracking the new things you write. There is a little bit of voodoo in getting this number, but we feel like we have a pretty good grip on it, and our data is getting better as time goes on.

Under your dashboard you'll now see a new tab, "Feed Stats." Under this it'll show you the rough number of unique people who checked your feed that day, and what's the breakdown of aggregators like Bloglines and FeedDemon people are using to track your RSS feeds.

Across all of WordPress.com, there are about 66 to 70 thousand subscribers to the various root feeds for all our blogs, yet these people generated 17.5 million hits in March. Whew!

Check out your stats and who's subscribing to your feed. If it's too low, it might be worth doing a post encouraging people to add your RSS feed (which is at yourblog.wordpress.com/feed/) to their aggregator. If your subscriber stats bounce around a lot, it's probably due to your posting frequency or the number of web browsers polling your feed.

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