Mark Fletcher, CEO of Bloglines, wrote up a detailed response to my two
recent posts: RSS Reader Market
Share and Contextual
Adverts in Bloglines in 2005. In his post, Mark analyses Boing Boing‘s web stats and draws some interesting comparisons
between Google and Bloglines in regards to Boing
Boing’s traffic:
“Nutshell: Bloglines is the 3rd largest source of referring pageviews on BoingBoing,
and the largest generator of referring hits to BoingBoing content, larger than Yahoo! and
Google — and all other search engines — combined. Bloglines generates 30% of all
referring hits to BoingBoing.”
I think basically he is making two points:
1) “Bloglines is the 3rd largest source of referring pageviews on BoingBoing”
–> meaning Bloglines is now boxing in the Web’s Heavyweight division, with Search
giants Google and Yahoo, in regards to straight
referrals to Boing Boing.
2) “…and the largest generator of referring hits to BoingBoing content”
–> meaning more people are reading Boing Boing via Bloglines than via any
other single method (including landing on Boing Boing’s site via Google or indeed all the
search engines combined). At least, that’s what I take from Mark’s claim that “Bloglines
audience share is 2.7x larger than Google’s in the number of overall impressions.” I hope
I’ve interpreted that correctly.
What does all this mean? At the high level, Mark seems to be suggesting that RSS is
the number one delivery method for Boing Boing’s content and that Bloglines is the
number one deliverer. And I mean ‘delivery’ in the wider context of not just
referrals to the Boing Boing website, but people reading Boing Boing’s content via
RSS.
There are other insights in Mark’s post too, so it’s well worth reading!
