Understanding RSS / Feed Subscriber Stats

One of the most powerful Squarespace components is the journal module, which can be used to create a blog. And among the most useful, but least understood, journal features is the automatic publishing of xml feeds, also known as RSS, Atom or RDF Feeds. (For more information on the concept of a xml feed, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed)

Once you set up a journal and let your users know the feed URL, Squarespace will start tracking your subscribers. This is known as your subscriber count and you can find it under Traffic > Subscribers in the Admin area.

In order to understand the subscriber count, you’ll need to know that web feeds are an anonymous technology that do not lend themselves to easy tracking. People aren’t actually subscribing to a feed like they would subscribe to an email list. Since its anonymous, the only record we have of subscribers are what IP addresses downloaded the feed. To make matters more complicated, someone’s feed reader can come multiple times a day to download your feed thus inflating the count. In order to give a more accurate estimate, we only count the number unique IPs downloading your feed. This implicitly means that the current day’s subscriber count is an estimate until the day is over because we can’t calculate the number of unique IPs until we have a full 24 hours of data. To find the true subscriber count for today, you have to wait until tomorrow.

Feed aggregators, such as GoogleReader, Bloglines, or NewsGator, give Squarespace additional information to augment the subscriber count. Those services download a feed on behalf of more than one person and when they grab a feed from Squarespace, they will self-report a subscriber number in their user agent identifier. For example, Bloglines tells us this:

Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 154 subscribers)

We look for this information and add the number of people Bloglines has told us are using them to read our feed, in this case adding 154 subscribers to the subscriber count. Some feed aggregators do not report this information and in those cases, we are just out of luck. We count those as one subscriber.

The last thing to understand is that the subscriber count is reported on a daily basis, which is the most common way of doing it. We combine the unique feed downloads and the self-reported aggregator numbers on a given day and that is the subscriber count. When you change the subscriber stats to a weekly view, it’s really important to note that we calculate the average number of subscribers per day during that week, not the sum of the subscribers across each day of the week. Likewise, the monthly view is the daily average during that month.

Now that we have the basics of the subscriber count down, I’d like to address the two most often asked questions about subscriber stats:

1) What is my total number of subscribers?

2) Why have my subscribers gone down/up recently?

The answer to the first question is that it is not really a good question to ask. :) Since a subscriber is anonymous, we don’t know from day to day how many people are “subscribed.” The ‘total number’ is ephemeral and that’s why we call it a daily subscriber count and not a total. This implies the answer to the second question, which is that the subscriber number is naturally very volatile. If a subscriber doesn’t open their RSS feed reader for a day, they won’t be counted and your subscriber count will go down on that day. This is a very important point to remember around the holidays because people tend to take a break from their computers and their RSS readers (which is healthy!). So keep in mind the subscriber count fluctuates from day to day and that most blogs suffer from a noticeable drop in subscribers on the holidays.

To sum up, if you are checking your subscriber count every day, my advice is to relax because the count is only an estimate and there isn’t much value in tracking it from day to day. And don’t worry if your subscribers fluctuate, especially in the beginning. The best way to see how your blog is doing is to look at longer term trends. Plus, you’ll gain more time to write in your blog.

I hope this was a useful explanation and good luck to all our bloggers out there!

Getting Your Podcasts Some Ads

When Steve Jobs says there are 160 thousand podcasts, it has to be a thriving business, right?  Well for some it certainly is, but those are few and far apart.  Basically, podcasts are recurring video shows, served on-site and through RSS.  Recurring should mean weekly, but now daily is the new weekly, so the more the merrier.  The ad carrot for podcasts is far more enticing as it can be north of $50 per cpm.  That ad is sold as a sponsorship and has a list of prerequisites a mile long.  More realistic are bulk ads which come in form of pre/post-roll or banners that pay $1-8 per cpm, which is still a lot.

How do you get to that carrot?  Well, you have a few factors to work with: viewer-ship, content type, your brand, and infrastructure.  The general rule of thumb is 100k views a month.  This is measured by actual downloads from various sources, and is the minimum bar to sign a real ad campaign.  Now, that number is skewed up if your content isn’t clearly related to a market, and more so if it is concerning for advertisers (like sex or cursing).  One method completely at your disposal is your brand, which lowers the viewer bar greatly or raises it, depending on where you land.  So, if you’re not Sony, it’s time to get building and make your show a property and community.

The best first step is your own destination site, which will usually directly handle 30% of your viewer-ship.  Your infrastructure is adjustable by you but at great cost, as this is principally hiring ad sales, management, and staff.  Today, internal infrastructure better maximizes ad value, but outsourced infrastructure at least gets you in the game.

We have a number of highly successful podcast communities built out in Squarespace — Break-a-Leg, and Dad-Labs for starters.  Many use Blip.tv for their streaming service, and they’re highly recommended for a good experience.  To sum up our advice: focus your energy where you can on a good show, a brand, guerilla marketing and outsource as much infrastructure as you can until you reach your magic viewer number.

Also, check out our manual guide for posting audio podcasts in your journal entries here.

Catching Up With The Squarespacers

We sincerely apologize for the sparse updates around here. In all honestly, it’s not that we’ve been lazy or forgetful, we’ve just been crazy, crazy busy. Those of you who subscribe to our service blog, frequent your Dashboard, or just pay attention in general have probably noticed there’s been a whole lot going on at Squarespace.

First, our programming team has developed a gorgeous new traffic system has been in development for a long time. It’s not just a pretty interface either — you’ll find the data to be more accurate and up to date with real time calculations of unique visitors, popular pages, referrers and queries, details like browsers and operating systems, and new RSS details such as how your subscriber count has changed over time.

There’s been a ton of other improvements and new features added in the last few months with the 4.1 and 4.1.1 releases. If you haven’t had caught up on it all yet, you’ll definitely want to make time to be sure you’re using all of the tools now available to you.

You may have noticed there’s been more layouts added in recent months as well. My newest, Playlist, addresses some requests we’ve seen come up in support tickets. There’s a wider content area (and a smaller sidebar), flexible padding settings (making it easier to add your own custom banner), and unobtrusive styling/graphics that won’t compete with your own site content, images or design enhancements.

We’ve also been working with talented designers and illustrators on layouts, including the Penelope and Katie layouts from Daphne & Clio, I Am Satisfied from Job Design, and Sunakku from Wolfgang Bartelme. These layouts address customer requests for designs as customized as some of our more advanced example sites. With these layouts, you can create a highly customized, graphically enhanced site without having to employ a designer or learn CSS.

Well, that about catches us up for now. We’ve made it a New Year resolution to post here more frequently, and I personally will be sharing some “behind the scenes” action in future posts. Stay tuned!

Happy New Year!

We wish all the members of our great Squarespace family a Happy New Year and a wonderful 2008.

Over the past year we have been continually inspired by all the amazing sites you have built and by the fact that you have served more than a billion pages. For our team, 2007 was a big year that brought about many exciting changes for the company. We hope you enjoyed our recent product releases, like the new galleries and the stats system. New features are currently in development, and we think 2008 will be our best year yet. Please keep creating those spectacular sites that have helped us remain the best publishing system on the web!