A personal blog found ~25% of traffic comes from RSS and newsletter subscribers, outpacing Google on a 28-day view.
Key Takeaways
Author added lightweight local-only stats tracking referrers, RSS opens via lazy-loaded images, and email opens via tracker pixels.
RSS and newsletter traffic combined beat Google; DuckDuckGo ranks surprisingly high, Bing rarely cracks top 20.
Fediverse and Bluesky show measurable referral traffic; Twitter referrals have nearly vanished.
RSS tracking is lossy by design: a hit fires when a client downloads a lazy-loaded image, not on confirmed reading.
Author blocks AI crawlers and bots but does not use AMP, keyword stuffing, or aggressive SEO.
Hacker News Comment Review
Strong selection bias concern: the blog covers open-web topics that over-index toward RSS-reader audiences, limiting generalizability.
RSS polling inflates raw hit counts with automated fetches and dead subscriptions from readers who never open articles, similar to podcast download counts.
Commenters flag a practical fix: embed tracking query params in feed URLs so RSS-originated clicks are identifiable in server logs without guessing.
Notable Comments
@jillesvangurp: notes LLM-based agents as a new layer on top of RSS to triage high-volume feeds and surface low-frequency posts.
@gbrindisi: “I protest the modern web by trying to consume all content via RSS” and sends manual emails to authors since read signals are invisible.
