February 2006 Summary

Here's a somewhat delayed summary of February's FeedBlitz metrics (please feel free to compare it to January's entry ).

The circulation count after February 28th was 314,000 up nearly 100,000 on the prior month, or about 42% month on month growth. Over 8,000 active readers now get FeedBlitz service updates from this blog, all via FeedBlitz. Premium service growth continues to, well, grow.

109,000 visitors came to the FeedBlitz web site in February, with the busiest day seeing 4,773 visits (compare to 100,000 visitors (max 3,987) in January, a longer month by 3 days or ~10%). There were 433,000 page views. The site's Alexa rank has remained between 8,000 and just better than 5,000 for most of the month.

While FeedBlitz performed well last month, new feature adds took a back seat to dealing with the surge in spambots and the threat they posed to continued service availability. The visual image verification took a while to settle in as we dealt with issues for some Mac users and AOL subscribers. Now it's done, the changes have been very effective at stopping the bots, and the number of requests to help solve the challenge is very small indeed, so all's well that ends well - we can get back to feature enhancements.

Despite the bot problem, new capabilities added to FeedBlitz in February were:

• The FeedBlitz chicklet.
• Adding the chicklet to FeedAdvisor.com.
• FeedFlare add-ins for FeedBurner publishers.
• Easy FeedBlitz subscription for the Google toolbar and Internet Explorer context menus.
• In addition, we've done a lot of work on the OPML reading list subscription, import and export capabilities. More on this tomorrow.

So the cool new features we promised last month didn't show up thanks to the bots. So, all things being equal, they should appear later this month. You'll be happy! Trust me...