How You Read My Content

A week ago, after chatting with Kev about his own findings, I created a similar survey (which is still open if you want to answer it) to collect a second set of data because why the heck not.

Kev’s data showed that 84.5% of responses picked RSS, Fediverse was second at 7.6%, direct visits to the site were third at 5.4%, and email was last at 2.4%.

My survey has a slightly different set of options and allows for multiple choices—which is why the % don’t add up to 100—but the results are very similar:

This is the bulk of the data, but then there’s a bunch of custom, random answers, some of which were very entertaining to read:

So the takeaway is: people still love and use RSS. Which makes sense, RSS is fucking awesome, and more people should use it.

Since we’re talking data, I’m gonna share some more information about the numbers I have available, related to this blog and how people follow it. I don’t have analytics, and these numbers are very rough, so my advice is not to give them too much weight.

31 people in the survey said they read content in their inbox, but there are currently 103 people who are subscribed to my blog-to-inbox automated newsletter.

RSS is a black box for the most part, and finding out how many people are subscribed to a feed is basically impossible. That said, some services do expose the number of people who are subscribed, and so there are ways to get at least an estimate of how big that number is. I just grabbed the latest log from my server, cleaned the data as best as I could in order to eliminate duplicates and also entries that feel like duplicates, for example:

Feedly/1.0 (+https://feedly.com/poller.html; 44 subscribers
Feedly/1.0 (+https://feedly.com/poller.html; 45 subscribers

In this case, it’s obvious that those two are the same service, and at some point, one more person has signed up for the RSS. But how about these:

Feedbin feed-id:1391566 - 6 subscribers
Feedbin feed-id:1429582 - 11 subscribers
Feedbin feed-id:1567199 - 702 subscribers
Feedbin feed-id:1748195 - 10 subscribers

All those IDs are different, but what should I do here? Do I keep them all? Who knows. Anyway, after cleaning up everything, keeping only requests for the main RSS feed, I’m left with 1975 subscribers, whatever that means. Are these actual people? Who knows.

Running the exact same log file (it’s the NGINX access log from Jan 10th to Jan 13th at ~10AM) through Goaccess, with all the RSS entries removed, tells me the server received ~50k requests from ~8000 unique IPs. 33% of those hits are from tools whose UA is marked as “Unknown” by Goaccess. Same story when it comes to reported OS: 35% is marked as “Unknown”. Another 15% on both of those tables is “Crawlers”, which to me suggests that at least half of the traffic hitting the website directly is bots.

In conclusion, is it still worth serving content via RSS? Yes. Is the web overrun by bots? Also yes. Is somebody watching me type these words? Maybe. If you have a site and are going to run a similar experiment, let me know about it, and I’ll be happy to link it here. Also, if you want some more data from my logs, let me know.