"Pheed Read" No. 1 - RSS Usage Revealed.

July 21, 2005

Pheedo decided to take a peek under the hood at some of the RSS advertiser and publisher data that we’ve been collecting. While not much has been published yet on RSS advertising statistics, we’d like to share a few insights for our publishers that we’re seeing from our reporting tools. Going forward, we’ll be more formally packaging our data and insight into a series of what we’re calling “Pheed Read” reports. Our initial insights follow.

Tuesday is the most active day in RSS; Saturday least active.

- Our initial observations of the data point to Tuesday being the most active day for viewership, feed retrieval and click-throughs.

- Click through rate (CTR) differs by over 70 percent from Tuesday, the most active day for RSS, to Saturday, the least active. Feed retrieval (when a user’s feed reader fetches the RSS feed) is a bit more consistent with a 47 percent swing between the two days.

- The second best day for all of the aforementioned metrics is Wednesday, showing an average 22 percent differential from Tuesday.

The “morning scanners” view most content; late night readers click through more.

- CTR fluctuates from 7 to 11 percent depending on the hour of the day that users are consuming the content. It is interesting to note that CTR peaks in the late night daypart hours and late in the afternoon during the daytime daypart hours.

- The initial CTR reports surprised us. Considering that CTR on PPC marketing is around 7 percent for a first rank item, with email and banner advertising trailing that number, a high CTR for RSS caught us off guard. Look for a deep dive into the CTR of RSS feeds and ads in a future report. Further, CTR is made up of two factors: impressions and click-throughs. Impression calculation does not take into account off-line viewing of feeds, which could potentially skew impression data.

- Viewership of RSS feeds follows a different trend. There is a significant spike in RSS readership during the early morning daypart, which tails off as the day goes on. We attribute this to the ‘scanning’ behavior of RSS consumers, whereby they read the volume of the content published overnight and in the morning immediately upon arriving to work or logging on each day. There is another spike in the late night. According the Online Publishers Association (OPA,) the typical reader during this late night daypart is the tech-savvy 18 to 24 year old reading from home.

Led by Bloglines, 70 percent of Pheedo managed feeds are read by only five aggregators.

- Consistent with other RSS aggregator market share reports on the Internet, Pheedo is seeing Bloglines atop our feed reader statistics, followed by Firefox, Thunderbird, NewsGator and Sharpreader. In aggregate, these readers are used by almost 70 percent of people subscribing to Pheedo managed RSS content.

RSS is growing up; Reader data illustrates shift from early adopters to mainstream.

- One interesting point to note is that the NetNewsWire aggregator for the Mac is no where in our top 5 aggregators, whereas it was number two in FeedBurner’s statistics. We attribute this to two factors. First, RSS is growing up. Charles Smith pointed out earlier this year that as RSS adoption moves mainstream, which is comprised mainly of Windows computers, we’ll see NetNewsWire’s share migrate to the space that is typically occupied by the Safari browser in most web analytics reports, about 1 to 2 percent. Secondly, the sample that we derived these stats from was skewed toward the technology category, which caters in large part to the Wintel market segment.

Posted on July 21, 2005 10:21 AM
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