As some of you probably know, Feedburner offers a full range of services to help you build awareness, track circulation, and implement revenue-generating programs in your RSS and ATOM feeds.
Tonight I started reading Michael Geoghegan’s blog where he blogs about the issues Leo port had with This Week in Tech podcast numbers getting published in Friday’ s Information Week article about podcasting
Leo Laporte decided to stop using Feedburner to serve feeds for all of his projects, including the popular TWIT (This Week In Tech) podcast. Apparently Leo had been experimenting with his Feed burner settings and had inadvertently activated a Feedburner Awareness API. (The API is off by default) It allows the Feedbrner Subscriber numbers for a feed to be available to third party apps, such as sites like Podfeed and PodNova, for publicity and ranking purposes. Leo didn’t fully realize this and was irritated when Rick Klau from Feedburner publicly announced TWIT’s Feedburner subscriber numbers in an Interview with Information Weekly. Eventually fences were mended but the end result is that Feedburner has lost a pretty high profile customer in a very public way and lots of folks have weighed in on one side or the other.
You can read the whole story by read this to post by Leo, Boy Was I Dumb and It’s Not Their Fault
The Feedburner blog clarifies this API - worth reading for publishers. Again, the API is off by default
Leo on the This Week in Tech blog post the following comment under his own post of It’s Not Their Fault
I get hard numbers from AOL on exactly how many downloads they’ve served. Each show is downloaded aroun 100,000 times from their site.
I don’t get counts from the mirrors, BitTorrents, and other sources, so I don’t really have a total number of downloads.
FeedBurner offers a “circulation” number which is somewhere around 40,000 for each 24 hour period. I don’t know what this means because they don’t really explain it. That’s the number that the Awareness API exposes. Is it the number of downloads per day? Is it the number of different people who get my feed each day? Do I multiply by 7 to get our weekly listenership? I don’t really know. I do know it doesn’t really correlate to any of my other numbers. I don’t think it’s a fair representation of our listenership either. That’s why I was unhappy about that number being public. Frankly I had no idea it was public until this brouhaha. That’s my fault for not reading the fine print and for forgetting that I’d even turned it on. But that’s another reason I don’t want to go through a third party - I don’t like surprises. If I do it myself then I have only myself to blame.
The fact is we don’t know exactly how many listen. And we don’t really care. We don’t have to give these numbers to advertisers, so they’re only for bragging rights.
Leo raises some good questions about Feedburner’s numbers. Feedburner needs to be able to show how they get to the numbers they do and jusify that system.
But unlike Leo, many who want or have advertisers, need to to have hard numbers to get ads and/or the rates they want. For Podcasting to go to the next level, it needs a system to be able to audit listenership. I don’t know if that is the business that Feedburner wants to be in, but they have been a place that people have been looking to for that.
There are many techincal challenges in getting an auditing system like Audit Bureau of Circulations. Bit Torrent, iTunes, what Microsoft may do with media player in the future all may cloud what the real downloads are for a podcast. Plus, people’s right to privacy may never allow us to know the real numbers when it comes to how many people listen to a podcast, so “circulation” may be as good as it gets.
Michael Geoghegan is right, the stats of your RSS feed are argueably one of your most valuable podcasting assets. But part that value is being able to be fairly solid about the numbers of your “circulation” base.
Rick Klau, VP of Business Development for Feedburner, has done a good job posting on blogs giving his side ot the story and it was great to see him engage the issue in a productive manner.
I respect Leo for admitting where he was wrong and his decision to move his podcasts off Feedburner. So up talk your RSS feeds if you listen any of Leo’s shows.
Technorati Tags: Feedburner, Leo Laporte, Rick Klau, Michael Geoghegan, Geoghegan, TWiT, Apple, iTunes
August 29th, 2005 at 7:40 am
Hi this is Dick Costolo from FeedBurner. I think we are very clear on our site about how we define and measure circulation and how we break it down for RSS feeds, and I think we do a good job of explaining it in detail on the statistics page for any publisher using our service. For podcasters, there are probably two numbers that need to be tracked: circulation and downloads. Circulation, as we define it on our site, represents the number of people who are subscribed to your feed on any given day. The number of people on behalf of whom your feed was requested on any given day. Downloads are another measurement. Downloads obviously represent the number of times a specific mp3 was downloaded. These numbers will almost never be the same. Some people will download twice, some aggregators will request the podcast on behalf of multiple subscribers, only some of whom will actually end up downloading the mp3, etc.
I think that both of these numbers in concert will become the preferred way of measuring listenership. One thing people will need to realize, over time, is that all stats tracking is a “estimates” business. Web stats have been around for how long now, and the major measurement companies still don’t agree over the traffic and unique visitors to certain sites, and that’s in a world where you have the added capability of cookies to make tracking even easier.
We have had a number of agencies talk to us about tracking “actual listens”, but that’s fraught with peril for all sorts of reasons, and is equivalent to measuring “yes, they came to this web page, but did they really READ it?”
August 29th, 2005 at 12:19 pm
I think you make a great point in the post above, “that all stats tracking is an estimates business”. Also we face more accountability with podcasting and the like since we do have more tools to track our circulation base - i.e. a magazine has no numbers representing how many people read it after the original buyer passes it off to a pal or house mate.
Again you are right, “actual listens” is a subject that’s fraught with peril. I pointed out the issue of privacy being the first, and I think biggest one. This is just another example where podcasting is being held to a higher standard of measurement than traditional forms of media.
Leo Laporte is a smart person and like all smart people can make a user error now and again, which is what started this discussion across the net. But Mr. Laporte is well trusted, well respected and also has a very large audience across podcasting, TV and radio, so when he questions how your company gets its numbers for a podcast, it is going to get people to take notice. You gave an easy to understand definition of what your Circulation stat means in the above post. When I had someone who had not been to the Feedburner site before go to the site and try to find out about RSS circulation statistics, my subject had a tough time. The about feed syndication page (http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/aboutrss) seems like a pretty good place to put definitions of terms like the one you did for circulation. Failing that, even just having the ability to search the site for a specific term would be an improvement over having to randomly click around looking for this information. (Yes, you can search the support forums but not the whole site)
This incident is one of those bumps on the road when a new medium is being developed and as it heads to the main stream. I have recommended your service to people in the past and mostly likely will continue to do so.
August 29th, 2005 at 2:17 pm
Hey Doug, it’s good to get feedback from folks who haven’t used the site before. We’re in the process of reworking our ui in order to allow for a much more expanded suite of services this fall, so I’ll make sure to pass along the easy to find definitions issue to the team.
October 12th, 2005 at 10:18 am
The heard word
These days it’s old news to say that marketing is a conversation, and that companies who ignore the blogosphere do so at their peril. (See Jarvis, Jeff for more.) Along with several other co-workers at FeedBurner, I’ve made monitoring the…