e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

Feed statistics

Recently, I've noticed that a lot of large media outlets offering syndicated news feeds (i.e., RSS and Atom) are using URI queries in the link in each entry. This is obviously being used to identify the number of people that click through from the feed to the main website, as most of the query strings are things like "?from=feed".

As eight-cubed.com offers syndicated feeds in a variety of feed formats (both RSS version 1.0 and 2.0, and Atom), I thought it would be a good idea to add similar query strings to links in my feeds to identify which of the formats generated the most click throughs. So now each link in an entry is identified by a query string that says "?from=atom", "?from=rdf", etc. This was implemented at the end of September.

The results have been interesting. Please note these are not the number of times the feeds were retrieved, but the number of times they generated a click through to the main website: