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Is Firefox artificially increasing FeedBurner subscriber counts? I don't think so!
2007 January 12
Stephan Juhl wrote a post a few days ago claiming that Firefox‘s “live bookmarks” feature might be artificially increasing the subscriber count in FeedBurners stats:
A couple of days ago Markus from AU interactive wrote a in blog post that 75% of his blogs feed reader audience uses Firefox Live Bookmarks. He then goes on to conclude that it’s because of when a feed is shown Firefox then Live Bookmarks is the default feed subscription method. I do think that Markus is somewhat correct in his assumptions on ‘the power of the default’ getting a lot of people to use Live Bookmarks for feeds. The problem is that his Feedburner stats is probably way of.
Firefox is requesting/prefetching a feed if it’s just correctly listed in the HTML head of a requested page. So it means that whenever someone visits your blog through a Firefox browser they’ll also request your RSS feed. Feedburner seems to counts a lot of the unique users’ requests of feeds which leads your Feedburner stats for ‘Firefox Live Bookmarks’ to be somewhat inflated.
Based on Stephan’s post I went in and looked at my feed statistics just for today. I have an amazing 2 people subscribing using Live Bookmarks. However, I have 32 Firefox hits to my feed!. So I though, Stephan is right! But then I looked closer at the Web Browser hits and saw a little information button. Clicking on it brought up a pop up which explains how FeedBurner deals with hits web browser hits (emphasis mine):
What is a Hit?
We record a Hit each time someone loads your feed in a web browser, feed reader or other program. When bots and automated services request your feed, that also counts as a Hit.
Live Hits
Your Live Hits page shows the time and user-agent for the last 25 hits to your feed. If we have fewer than 25 hits on record, we’ll list all of them. It looks like this:
Why does it matter?
Hits don’t always correspond to subscribers, but they’re still important. Especially when they come from a web browser.
Potential subscribers are likely to “hit” your feed in their web browser when they click a “subscribe” link on your web site or discover your feed in a search engine. While these people are not counted as Subscribers (but will be the moment they get hooked on your content and start viewing it with a feed reader), they have nonetheless seen your feed, and we count these exposures as Hits.
So there you have it. FeedBurner distinguished between the browser prefetching the feed and actually viewing it in Live bookmarks and doesn’t count them as subscribers. However that still doesn’t explain what happened to Markus. A bug on FeedBurners end maybe?
2 Responses
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Without looking at the specifics of Markus’s data (it’s our policy not to divulge specific statistics info without the author’s permission), I have a few thoughts on why LiveBookmarks may be so over-represented in his feed. First off, thanks to a post earlier this week at Stefan Juhl’s site , we now know that Firefox doesn’t pass the prefetch header when it’s following a 302 redirect, so anyone who uses a 302 to redirect their feed to us will likely see an over-sampling of Firefox subscribers in the subscriber report. (We’re working with the Firefox team to try to determine if there’s a workaround either of us can implement to address this down the road.)
Secondly, any time a site gets an influx of traffic (say, from Digg, Slashdot, etc.), there will be a much higher concentration of Firefox traffic on that day, and since versions of Firefox prior to 2.0 didn’t distinguish between LiveBookmarks requests and browser requests (2.0 does), it’s quite likely that we’ll interpret some of those requests as subscription requests when they’re in fact browser requests.
Now – if Markus’s data is consistently showing the same share of LB subscribers, then we’re probably seeing the same hits on a regular basis, then we’d be pretty confident in those numbers being an accurate representation of his subscriber numbers.
Hope this helps, let us know if you have any other questions.
Regards,
Rick Klau
VP, Publisher Services
FeedBurner
rickk@feedburner.com
312.756.0022 x2012
Thanks for stopping by and clearing that up Rick! Much appreciated!