Last week Google’s recently acquired Feedburner, one of the leaders in RSS syndication and a darling of the blogosphere, quietly announced it would begin offering a number of premium services for free. Among them — the new “Reach†metric, which, according to Feedburner, is the total number of people who have actually taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in a feed. It’s similar to the difference between knowing how many subscribers a magazine has, and then how many people actually pull it out of the recycling bin and read or interact with it. Quite important!
For all the self-conscious bloggers addicted to their site and reader analytics — including those seeking to monetize through advertising — reach is sure to become one of the more scrutinized metrics. It will drive greater attention to content interaction and surely prompt new questions around media and advertising engagement.
This was the topic of my MediaPost column this week. Check it out, along with MediaPost reader comments, here.
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