Quick Hit: Feed Terminology
by Rick • Filed under Analyze • February 20, 2007
Below are terms that we use periodically to describe various behaviors observed with feed consumption:
- 30 Day Active Users: Yahoo’s method for calculating the subscriber number they report to FeedBurner and other feed publishers. Individuals who have subscribed to a feed but who have not logged into My Yahoo! or Yahoo! Mail within the last 30 days are not included in the reported number.
- Cumulative Subscribers: Used by Bloglines, Google Reader and other web-based aggregators, all individuals who have subscribed to a feed are included in the reported number. Individuals who unsubscribe from a feed are not included in the reported number; individuals who have not logged in recently are.
- Item Views All on page/Visible Only: To track item views, FeedBurner inserts a “tracking GIF” that corresponds to a specific feed item. When a feed item is viewed in an aggregator, it requests this tracking GIF, allowing us to establish that the feed item was viewed. Some aggregators render all images on a page at once; others render only what is visible in the browser window.
- Clickthroughs: Publishers who use FeedBurner are given the option to rewrite the links to their posts so that the clickthrough is recorded by FeedBurner before the reader is sent to the publisher’s site.
For more on the individual aggregator’s behaviors, see: Rojo, Pageflakes, Netvibes, NewsGator, Bloglines, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google.
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