mydigimedia by Amy L. Webb

FeedBurner published a report last week explaining its view of user engagement based on data collected from its own users. The company used a sample size of 604,533 feeds and 347,000 or so bloggers/ podcasters.

Now keep in mind that FeedBurner compets with Google and a host of other companies...still, what they published can inform newspaper and magazine publishers.

The report enforces something that my colleagues and I have been saying for the past two years: online content collection and delivery needs to be incredibly diverse. "Today's key takeaway is that feeds represent only one aspect of a publisher's overall content consumption. We're living in a world of distributed media after all: people might be reading your content directly on your site, within a widget, via resyndicated headlines on another site, or on a social networking site."

Key findings:

• Not all subscribers are alike. Yahoo reports active subscribers over a rolling 30-day period. Most other web-based readers report the total number of individuals who've subscribed, regardless of whether they have actually logged in recently.
• Default feeds are popular. (Yes, this is an early frontrunner in 2007 "Painfully Obvious Bullet" balloting.) Said differently: many aggregators offer a set of default feeds for every new account, or provide "bundles" of feeds by category. These feeds will get disproportionately high subscriber numbers at specific aggregators.
• This prelude sets up what we think is a better statistic for measuring market share: Engagement. Audience engagement, which is to say, people reading feeds and people clicking on feeds - is how we've increasingly been interpreting feed subscription numbers to better understand market penetration.

And I'll say it one more time. Newspapers need to make it much easier for users to find their feeds and to subscribe. You can't hide a bunch of orange buttons on your website and hope that users will know what to do with them.

Seed Newsvine