My own analysis of “FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market”

Burning Questions • FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market

In this article, FeedBurner gave us quite a few insights about people’s habits regarding RSS feeds. Anyone having a blog or website can use this article to be more friendly to the readers, to boost RSS feed subscription, and to help growing the revenue you get from your website.

Another analysis can be found at TechCrunch.

Fact 1 : Google Reader is the major web based RSS feed reader

That is to say that you’d better add this “Add to Google Reader” button after all … And probably do the same for Bloglines, NewsGator and Netvibes as well.

Fact 2 : Many readers just might actually ever hit your web pages

Those people will read your articles through their favorite RSS aggregator, especially if you provide full content in your RSS feed.

This also means that if you try to get a revenue from your website through advertising (ex : AdSense), this won’t count as an ad impression, and the reader won’t get a chance to click on any related advertisment.
It might be a good idea to provide the RSS feed with an anchor to your article (a link pointing back to the full content on your website)

Fact 3 : provide good content or they won’t come back

(you didn’t see that one coming, did you ? ;-))

If you enjoy watching the number of people subscribing your blog growing, provide good content. All those numbers are just numbers … Why would they subscribe your RSS feed, or even come back to your site if the content is nasty ?