Todd is a veteran podcaster, the head of the Tech Podcast Network and author of Podcasting: Do It Yourself Guide. Todd is one of the old men in field and I have a lot of respect for him. That's why I can't understand how he can completely miss how hard it is to provide RSS stats.
Todd says:
There is nothing magical about a RSS feed it is a file that sits on your website, and when an application needs to be updated it reaches across the web pulls a copy from your webserver and your webserver logs the encounter in a log file. Then it is just a simple mater of processing that log file and providing very detailed infomation about your RSS feed.
Yikes! That's how web pages are counted, not RSS feeds. The difference is in the behaviour of a news aggregator vice a human surfing the web. I wrote an article on just this a while ago. Here's some of the pertinent bits:
First we decided that the number of hits on a feed was a good indicator of listenership. Then we realized that RSS feeders can hit a site every ten minutes to see if there's new content.
Then we tried to apply the concept of unique RSS hits, but that not only has the same problems as unique web hits with respect to return listenership, routers are so much more commonplace now that hundreds and perhaps thousands of listeners can be represented by one single corporate IP.
Then we started mucking around with time intervals. If the same IP hits the feed in 10 minutes, it's the same guy. If it's 30 minutes later, we'll count that as a new guy.
Then we tried to apply the concept of unique RSS hits, but that not only has the same problems as unique web hits with respect to return listenership, routers are so much more commonplace now that hundreds and perhaps thousands of listeners can be represented by one single corporate IP.
Then we started mucking around with time intervals. If the same IP hits the feed in 10 minutes, it's the same guy. If it's 30 minutes later, we'll count that as a new guy.
This is very, very difficult stuff which is why there are only a couple of people in the podcasting space even attempting meaningful stats: Feedburner and Libsyn.
Read the rest of my article, here.
But we all know the same ip can hit a rss feed multiple times a day it is not hard to filter out in fact we built our own RSS Stats system for the RawVoice Generator. Its not hard to filter out multiple hits a day and measure how often you see a specific IP..
It's not rocket science.
Posted by: todd cochrane | June 9, 2006 12:02 AM | Permalink to Comment