Measure This! No Ruler Required.
Tuesday, March 09, 2004RSS Tipping Point
This from the CTO at InfoWorld. Chad thinks this is significant. I think their experience was significant long before their RSS hits exceeded their home page hits. If their site is similar to that of my employer, only 50% of entry hits are on the home page.
RSS consumers are begging you to send them information. They are the power-users that you really want. They don't want to wait until some marketing email czar decides it is time for another blast. They are begging you to send them information as soon as you have something to say. They don't want to wait until your "once a month" newsletter or your "twice a month" email blast. They want to know now if you have anything new to say. As far as I'm concerned, it can't get any better than that.
Ever since we began publishing RSS feeds at InfoWorld, the requests for our home page had always exceeded requests for our Top News RSS feed. Not any more. Over the past several weeks, requests for InfoWorld's Top News RSS feed have regularly exceeded the requests for our home page. This has been going on long enough now that we're certain that it's permanent. I think it's a big deal.
During the business day, we track hour-to-hour performance (using a combination of shell scripts and Analog) and in any given hour, about 8 of our top 10 most requested files are RSS files. The actual numbers are proprietary, of course, but I can say that we have seen significant growth in overall RSS requests just in the past several weeks.
Feels like a tipping point to me.
(I realize that the characteristics of RSS aggregators' requests are different than those initiated by regular users browsing your site -- aggregators behave more like robots or spiders. But I still think this is significant.)
[Chad Dickerson]
