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How the author knows its website has hundreds of subscribers? AFAIK is not possible to identify subscribers to RSS feeds and counting hits won't help. Am I miss

How the author knows its website has hundreds of subscribers? AFAIK is not possible to identify subscribers to RSS feeds and counting hits won't help. Am I missing something here?

skilled 2y ago
Some sites like Feedly and others show the subscriber count in the User-Agent string.
- __all__ 2y ago
  Interesting, didn't know. Will check that!
  - skilled 2y ago
    In my own logs, the ones that show are Feedly, Inoreader, Newsblur, Feedbin, The Old Reader, and a few small/personal ones. Of course, they only show the subscriber count for their own platform. And then you can also pool together all the separate requests fetching /feed/ and add it all up.
Erethon 2y ago
You can get a rough estimate based on unique IPs hitting the RSS feed. Moreover, some of the online feed readers report the number of subscribers of your feed as part of their User-Agent. An example from my blog logs: `"Feedbin feed-id:2688376 - 9 subscribers"`
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
susam 2y ago
Hi! Some feed aggregators include the subscriber count in the User-Agent header, so I can pick these counts from the access logs and add them up. This is how the logs look: [14/Jun/2024:00:03:46 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 87 subscribers; )" [14/Jun/2024:00:06:29 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 34 subscribers; )" [14/Jun/2024:00:09:31 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 31 subscribers; )" [14/Jun/2024:00:16:36 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedbin feed-id:2815708 - 3 subscribers" [14/Jun/2024:00:29:42 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedbin feed-id:2330316 - 3 subscribers" [14/Jun/2024:00:40:58 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedbin feed-id:1714691 - 8 subscribers" [14/Jun/2024:01:21:01 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 188077 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BazQux/2.4; +https://bazqux.com/fetcher; 5 subscribers)" [14/Jun/2024:01:44:21 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "https://susam.net/" "Inoreader/1.0 (+http://www.inoreader.com/feed-fetcher; 24 subscribers; )" Picking a few days of logs where the subscriber count has not changed much, I get a rough estimate of the total count of subscribers reported by the feed readers like this: $ for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do echo $(head -n 1 access.log.$i | grep -o '../.../....') $(awk -F'"' '{print $6}' access.log.$i | sort -u | grep -o '[0-9]* subscribers' | awk '{s += $1} END {print s}'); done 13/Jun/2024 335 12/Jun/2024 335 11/Jun/2024 336 10/Jun/2024 334 09/Jun/2024 337 In case anyone is wondering why we see multiple entries for Feedly and Feedbin in the first log snippet, that's because in an older design of my website, I had multiple sections each serving its own feed at paths like /blog/feed.xml, /maze/feed.xml, etc. Later I consolidated all of them into a unified feed at /feed.xml. So the feed readers still hit the old feed URLs and then get redirected to the unified feed URL.

How the author knows its website has hundreds of subscribers? AFAIK is not possible to identify subscribers to RSS feeds and counting hits won't help. Am I missing something here?

skilled 2y ago

Some sites like Feedly and others show the subscriber count in the User-Agent string.

__all__ 2y ago
Interesting, didn't know. Will check that!
- skilled 2y ago
  In my own logs, the ones that show are Feedly, Inoreader, Newsblur, Feedbin, The Old Reader, and a few small/personal ones. Of course, they only show the subscriber count for their own platform. And then you can also pool together all the separate requests fetching /feed/ and add it all up.

Erethon 2y ago

You can get a rough estimate based on unique IPs hitting the RSS feed. Moreover, some of the online feed readers report the number of subscribers of your feed as part of their User-Agent. An example from my blog logs: `"Feedbin feed-id:2688376 - 9 subscribers"`

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

susam 2y ago

Hi! Some feed aggregators include the subscriber count in the User-Agent header, so I can pick these counts from the access logs and add them up. This is how the logs look: [14/Jun/2024:00:03:46 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 87 subscribers; )" [14/Jun/2024:00:06:29 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 34 subscribers; )" [14/Jun/2024:00:09:31 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 31 subscribers; )" [14/Jun/2024:00:16:36 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedbin feed-id:2815708 - 3 subscribers" [14/Jun/2024:00:29:42 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedbin feed-id:2330316 - 3 subscribers" [14/Jun/2024:00:40:58 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "-" "Feedbin feed-id:1714691 - 8 subscribers" [14/Jun/2024:01:21:01 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 188077 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BazQux/2.4; +https://bazqux.com/fetcher; 5 subscribers)" [14/Jun/2024:01:44:21 +0000] "GET /feed.xml HTTP/1.1" 304 0 "https://susam.net/" "Inoreader/1.0 (+http://www.inoreader.com/feed-fetcher; 24 subscribers; )" Picking a few days of logs where the subscriber count has not changed much, I get a rough estimate of the total count of subscribers reported by the feed readers like this: $ for i in 1 2 3 4 5; do echo $(head -n 1 access.log.$i | grep -o '../.../....') $(awk -F'"' '{print $6}' access.log.$i | sort -u | grep -o '[0-9]* subscribers' | awk '{s += $1} END {print s}'); done 13/Jun/2024 335 12/Jun/2024 335 11/Jun/2024 336 10/Jun/2024 334 09/Jun/2024 337 In case anyone is wondering why we see multiple entries for Feedly and Feedbin in the first log snippet, that's because in an older design of my website, I had multiple sections each serving its own feed at paths like /blog/feed.xml, /maze/feed.xml, etc. Later I consolidated all of them into a unified feed at /feed.xml. So the feed readers still hit the old feed URLs and then get redirected to the unified feed URL.