

A VC: Three Statistics That Lie - echair
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/07/three-statistic.html

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josefresco
Isn't the problem with Feedburner and RSS feed stats that they count "hits"
and not actual subscribers (aka unique visitors). So if my RSS reader asks
Feedburner 20 times a day for new content it counts as 20 to the total?

Anyone with info on this want to clarify?

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petercooper
No. FeedBurner has a basketful of algorithms to deal with this.

In the most significant cases, the readers actually report back to FeedBurner
how many subscribers are using that reader. For example, Google Reader. In the
user agent string, Google Reader (as well as, I believe, Netvibes, Newsgator,
and a few others) says "X subscribers", and that number is then used by
FeedBurner. You can check this out yourself if you have access to web stats on
a domain that hosts feeds. Check them out. You get to see the same numbers
that FeedBurner puts on their charts.

With non-Web / non-centralized readers, it gets trickier, but FeedBurner uses
IP addresses combined with user agent strings to get an idea of what's a
unique reader requesting multiple times or not. Typically this system works
well and isn't wildly inaccurate.

