A personal blog finds RSS and newsletter subscribers account for ~25% of traffic, outpacing Google over a 28-day window.
Key Takeaways
RSS and email tracking are lossy: a hit fires when a client loads a lazy-loaded image or email tracker pixel, not necessarily when a human reads.
DuckDuckGo ranks surprisingly high in referrer data; Bing rarely cracks the top 20; Twitter referrals have nearly vanished.
Fediverse and Bluesky are tracked as distinct referrer sources alongside RSS and newsletter.
Author uses local, lightweight, self-hosted stats rather than third-party analytics, blocking AI crawlers and bots to reduce noise.
RSS traffic is qualitatively different from search traffic: subscribers are opted-in repeat readers, not one-time query visitors.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters flag strong selection bias: a blog focused on open web standards naturally attracts an RSS-reader audience, skewing the comparison.
RSS readers auto-fetch feeds on schedule, so “traffic” hits may reflect automated polling rather than actual human reads, similar to podcast download counts.
