How engaged is your audience?

Really excited with the latest post we put up today at the company blog: FeedBurner’s View of the Feed Market. The gist of the post is this: for all the attention focused on subscriber numbers, they’re an incomplete metric to use when evaluating a feed’s audience. What good are a million subscribers if they never read your content? Don’t get me wrong: subscribing to a feed is a start: it’s an implicit vote of trust, it’s a reader saying that your content is interesting, that they want it delivered to them as soon as it’s updated. But it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Publishers who want a better understanding of their audience’s engagement with their content can look at how often their feed items (“posts”) are rendered in feed readers, and can also use us to track click-throughs to their posts. Both of these metrics provide a way to go beyond the subscriber number – if the subscription is an indiciation of interest, then the views and clicks are a manifestation of that ongoing interest.

Anyway, we’re going to put together a few more of these over the next few weeks. With the number of feeds we host (up over 600,000 – there were only 20,000 when I joined!) and the number of publishers using us (340,000, up from 12,000 when I joined), we’ve got a lot of data, and a few more interesting observations to share. Stay tuned!