January 2006 Summary

Time for the monthly "State of the FeedBlitz" post. As ever, let's do the numbers first.

The circulation count after January 31st was 220,753 - up 66,132 during the month. That's only a little under the absolute growth in December and represents 43% month on month growth.

Even with the change to tighten up individual feed circulation metrics, over 6,000 readers now track this blog daily, up from 4,600 at the end of December, and double November's month-end count. According to Google Analytics, January's busiest day saw 3,987 individuals visit the site, compared to 2,700 visitors for December's most active day. Overall, feedblitz.com had 100,000 visitors in January, with 401,000 page views, up 56% and 45% respectively compared to December 2005.

According to Alexa, FeedBlitz's best rank was around the 10,000 mark in December, typically ending up between 20,000 and 15,000. FeedBlitz's current average is 6,489, and the site was in the top 5,000 web sites for four days last month. All in all, the metrics are very positive and emphasizing our position as the undisputed #1 RSS to email service.

From a publisher perspective, 26 feeds now have more than 1,000 FeedBlitz email subscribers, and another 20 more than 500. The "Pro" premium service is the most popular upgrade by far, with many professional providers using it to deliver affordable and manageable newsletters, customized to their own look and feel, delivered using their own "from" addresses and custom subject lines. Over 500 publishers use FeedBlitz to distribute podcast update notifications.

Which brings me to the service improvements made in January. Here's the highlight reel:

• The launch of FeedAdvisor based on FeedBlitz subscriber patterns, and several FeedAdvisor-related feature improvements.
• Custom delivery addresses and subject lines for Pro users.
• Improved Atom 1.0 compatibility
• "Remember Me" login option
• Enclosure highlighting for podcasts
• OPML reading list import

On the downside, there were a couple of days in January where delivery was very late. That's a couple of days too many, and changes were put in place to address it. Yet despite the growth in circulation and publisher volumes and the extra time it takes to deliver these additional capabilities, the nightly run still takes about four hours to complete, on the exact same (relatively modest) hardware FeedBlitz started out on. Technically, it's scaling very well.

So what of February? A new twist on tailored content delivery for subscribers for one, more OPML, and further insight into your metrics. A short month, yes, but it's going to be fun with a lot going on. We're off to an excellent start: the chicklet has already proved itself very popular, and there's more where that came from. Stay tuned...