3 ms·
One hackneyed reason that some folks give for not wanting to expose their RSS is wanting some level of legibility into their subscribers. I recently learned tha
by jmduke 3y ago
One hackneyed reason that some folks give for not wanting to expose their RSS is wanting some level of legibility into their subscribers. I recently learned that many large RSS readers actually expose high-level analytics numbers [^1] so you can get an estimate of RSS readership that way, too. Would love for more readers to support this functionality: as far as I can tell across all of the RSS feeds my product exposes, the only supporting clients of this faux protocol are NewsBlur, Feedly, Feedbin, and inoreader.
[^1]: ht to Darek Kay's blog post, https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/ https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/, for alerting me to this fact!
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoThis is also common for podcast clients with server-side crawling, which is basically all of them.
- rambambram 3y agoExposing the number of subscribers from large RSS readers is a nice addition, but it also slightly nudges one to centralization. I try to let site owners know I'm subscribed to their feed by adding an URL parameter like /?rss_ref=heyhomepage.com They might or might not see this RSS referrer in their own visitor statistics. I also do not consume all the article's content solely in my reader, but I show a short summary and then click the link to the article. This way I can enjoy their (personal) site and they can see my traffic more clearly.
- worksonmine 3y agoThe easiest solution for this would be to just check the server requests. My reader is terminal based and adding support for js analytics kind of defeats the purpose.
- jmduke 3y agoTo be clear, the approach outlined above _is_ based on just HTTP; there's no javascript involved.