A Peek Inside TechCrunch's 100k Subscriber Milestone

Seems like just yesterday we welcomed TechCrunch to the FeedBurner family (now 242,062 publishers strong). Quite a bit has happened since June 15, 2005 when founder Michael Arrington was writing the first profiles of such companies as Flickr, Del.icio.us, Digg and Bloglines. Today, TechCrunch has covered nearly 850 new Internet products and existing companies that are making an impact on the new web space. Besides being a household name among new media news junkies, TechCrunch has expanded into a network of sites and is widely considered to be the go-to destination for the freshest content and scoop du jour.

For those participating in the "Guess How Many Jellybeans in Today's FeedCount Chicklet" contest, you may have noticed that TechCrunch recently surpassed the 100k subscriber mark. Given this major milestone, we asked Michael if he'd be willing to open the hood and share some of the data about his feed and the rich history behind the impressive growth shown below.

But first, a little backstory.

What is this?

The subscriber number featured in TechCrunch's FeedCount chicklet is an approximate measure of the number of individuals who have opted in to receive regular updates to TechCrunch content. These people have either added the TechCrunch feed to their feed reader or subscribed by email. Similar to circulation data from a newspaper, FeedBurner tracks this number and reports it as "subscribers."

Due to the way feed-reading tools behave, it is completely normal for this number to fluctuate. For example, some people who read TechCrunch access the feed using a desktop feed reader such as NetNewsWire and these folks may turn off their computers on the weekends. During that time, the TechCrunch feed isn't being polled and the subscriber isn't being counted, which is reported accordingly. Take a look at the TechCrunch subscriber data over the last 30 days to see how weekend dips are part of a regular trend, but generally do not affect the upward direction of the chart over time.

How is the subscriber number calculated?
Generally speaking, FeedBurner calculates subscribers by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, and then using our detailed understanding of the polling behavior of a multitude of readers, aggregators, browsers and bots on the market to make additional inferences. Because we manage upwards of 390,000 feeds, we see thousands of different feed-consuming clients. When new ones hit the market, we see them first and can report them. (Bots aren't included in the total subscriber count, but they are all broken out on the TechCrunch Dashboard for reference).

FeedBurner breaks down the most recent 24-hour subscriber numbers (and other non-subscriber feed requests) into the following four categories:

• Feed Readers and Aggregators
• Email Subscription Services
• Web Browsers
• Bots (feed search engines or "resyndicators" that scrape feeds and republish content on Web pages)

Where do all of these TechCrunch subscribers come from?
When TechCrunch launched in June 2005, FeedBurner was tracking its fair share of feed readers and aggregators. Since then, a flurry of others have come on the market, some with a significant impact. In the case of TechCrunch, the PageFlakes feed reader came on the scene in late 2005. Today, it is the 7th most popular feed-reading application for the TechCrunch subscriber base. The top twenty feed readers and aggregators are as follows:

• Firefox Live Bookmarks
• NewsGator Online
• Bloglines
• Netvibes
• Rojo
• FeedReader
• Pageflakes
• Pluck (Internet Explorer Edition)
• NetNewsWire
• Attensa for Outlook
• News Alloy
• Google Desktop
• Safari RSS (OS X Tiger)
• Thunderbird
• My Yahoo
• Sage
• Windows RSS Platform
• FeedDemon
• NewsFire
• SharpReader

This breakdown is by no means representative of broader market numbers or trends, and in fact it's interesting to see the differences in the aggregator profiles for different feeds. For example, some feeds might be made a default "startup" feed for a particular aggregator, based on the theory that people will want to begin their feed-reading experience with a set of compelling feeds. How do you tell whether they're really "active" subscribers? More on that in a minute.

Today, there are a total of 503 different feed readers, 7 email services, 5 Web browsers and 46 bots accessing the TechCrunch feed on a regular basis.

There are all sorts of specialty clients, open source aggregators, and other services among the more than 500 readers that request the TechCrunch feed on behalf of at least one subscriber, including a GNOME specific aggregator like Straw, the social syndication personal start page SpeedyFeed, the Web 2.0 named Waggr, a Windows Mobile feed reader hubdog, the Chinese language aggregator GouGou, and obviously, a whole lot more.

Finally, TechCrunch boasts a healthy email list with over 4,000 subscribers who have opted to receive email updates when new content is posted. There are a wide variety of feed-to-email services on the market today. TechCrunch uses FeedBurner Email, as seen in the breakdown below.

Reach
While the subscriber number is a measure of how many people have opted in to receive a feed, "Reach" is the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in a feed. At any given time, a certain percentage of the TechCrunch subscriber base is actively engaging with content and this “Reach” measurement provides this additional insight for a given day. Again, to use the example of a newspaper subscription, FeedBurner's "Reach" calculation is akin to the number of people who have opened the newspaper and actually glanced at the Sudoko puzzle, as opposed to the guy who lets his paper sit out in the rain and get soggy while he's spending the weekend in Medicine Hat. He's still considered a subscriber, but just can't get to his feeds right now.

Due to the way feeds time-shift content for us as subscribers, allowing us to catch up with our feeds whenever we want, it is not uncommon to see very popular and active feeds with a small percentage reach engagement on any given day, even in a feed where 100% of the total subscriber base is active, simply because most subscribers don't check all of their feeds every day. For example, the reach metric for the TechCrunch feed on Thursday, September 7, 2006 was 25% of its total subscriber base.

What's interesting to note is that as the number of subscribers to TechCrunch has increased, so has the engagement level of the audience. The follow chart illustrates the "Reach" metric for TechCrunch since FeedBurner started tracking this data in February 2006. Understanding the same dynamic of weekend fluctuation, the general trend indicates that people are continuing to engage in TechCrunch content, they aren't just subscribing for the sake of subscribing. This reach data point is calculated on the same 24-hour time period when any one individual clicks or views content in the feed.

Uncommon Uses
Once content is out there, in distribution land, it can be really tough to keep track of where it's being picked up and resyndicated. FeedBurner helps TechCrunch identify “Uncommon Uses” of feed content. In other words, the places where TechCrunch content shows up beyond the aggregators and feed readers that we've catalogued. These references could be other TechCrunch sites, news filters for specific niche content, a blog assembled from feeds, or even spam blogs. Sometimes, the sites listed in the Uncommon Uses section are a source of clicks driving a significant amount of traffic back to the originating site. Another way to think of uncommon uses is that it provides a handy snapshot of "all the other places your content is going" beyond your subscriber base. FeedBurner provides detailed visibility into uncommon uses as seen below.

That's pretty fancy, but why not just get this info from the server logs?
One of the reasons FeedBurner got into the business of helping publishers deliver subscriptions is because tracking syndicated content can be a challenging task. The number of programs that can "read feeds" keeps increasing. The various news readers/aggregators on the market today each poll for new content differently which can result in hits to a web server that are certainly not representative of unique visitors. To illustrate, the popular Web-based aggregator, MyYahoo!, may poll 3 times a day on behalf of thousands of people while the desktop aggregator, FeedDemon polls every half hour on behalf of 1 person. Because of this polling behavior that is unique to feeds, traditional web server stats packages won't reflect this measurement.

What's not being reported?
Today, there are many people who may visit www.techcrunch.com on a daily, weekly or once-every-blue-moon basis. Since these site visitors may not be subscribed to the TechCrunch feed, they are not reflected in the TechCrunch subscriber number. We don't like people to feel left out. So, by the end of this year, FeedBurner will have integrated Blogbeat functionality into our free StandardStats service. With the combination of both site and feed stats in one place, TechCrunch (and everyone else) will have the full picture of how their content is being consumed. Specifically, who's reading, what posts are being read, how many feed subscribers are coming back to the site, etc.

TechCrunch feed management tools of choice
Michael and his posse of TechCrunchers make great use of a number of FeedBurner's feed management services to optimize the distribution of their content. In addition to the StandardStats service, they use TotalStats to get item-level insight that reveals interesting factoids about individual posts. For example, the recent post about the Facebook redesign generated 15,875 views in feed readers and on the Web and 2,477 clicks back to the original item the day it was posted. TechCrunch has also made the subscription process very easy for visitors. By integrating the FeedBurner email service into the title bar and making use of the BrowserFriendly service, conversion from passerby to loyal follower is high.

Final fun facts about the TechCrunch feed

• TechCrunch subscriptions represent 0.47% of FeedBurner's total subscription base
• The most active day (based on the "Reach" statistic) was September 6, 2006
• Subscribers to TechCrunch come from all over the world including Denmark, Germany, Brazil, Poland and Thailand

We hope this peek into the inner workings of FeedBurner metrics for a very popular publisher helped you explore just how much is going on under the aforementioned hood of that syndication engine. The feed is indeed the powerplant for more content delivery today, and we want to help you tune that baby. If you found this case study interesting and would like to submit your feed-growing story for consideration in a future post, send us an email.