Measure This! No Ruler Required.

Amy Gahran - Do Webfeeds Help or Hurt Site Traffic
Do Webfeeds Help or Hurt Site Traffic?. On June 3, Dave Winer (a key creator of the RSS technical standard wrote an article answering this question: Would a big media company lose traffic if they supported RSS?
This piece a good, timely complement to my June 4 article, How Many People Read Your Webfeed?
Winer's main point, with which I heartily agree, is this: "I don't think that providing [webeeds], if you do it right, lowers traffic, in fact I think you can gain traffic."
I both agree and disagree with Winer's other points...
(Full story, with links to Winer's article and other resources...)
[Contentious Weblog]
Amy Gahran - How Many People Read Your Webfeed?
How Many People Read Your Webfeed?. From the perspective of many online publishers, webfeeds (whether RSS or Atom format) have one big shortcoming: In most cases, it's difficult or impossible to know how many people subscribe to your webfeed.
Circulation numbers have always been the cornerstone of the publishing world, and that hasn't changed in the online age. This is especially true if a site's business model hinges at all on advertising, or on leveraging relationships with readers to sell other products or services, or to promote a particular organization or issue. For those sites, offering a webfeed feels a bit dangerous – they don't necessarily fear losing readers, but rather losing track of how many readers they have.
Webfeed metrics is a complex issue that mainly boils down to technology. Most content and publishing people aren't technical specialists. However, this is one technical area that online publishers probably should understand (on at least a basic level) and follow major developments.
Here are a few good resources to get you started...
[Contentious Weblog]