760% growth for FeedBlitz in 2006

With this first post of the new year, instead of the usual monthly update, here's a look back at all of 2006 and how FeedBlitz, the leading RSS to email service, changed during the year.

The Metrics

Looking back at December 2005's update, FeedBlitz had an active circulation of 154,621. As 2007 started, we had an active circulation of over 1,331,600 - that's over 8.6 times larger than a year ago, for an annual circulation growth rate of over 760%.

At the end of 2005, this blog, FeedBlitz News, had 4,600 subscribers. There are now over 45,000. Back in 2005, feedblitz.com saw 64,000 visits and 277,000 page views in December. By contrast, December 2006 saw over 410,000 visits and nearly a million page views (things got pretty quiet between Christmas and New Year, with site traffic running at around 20% less than a typical week; this kept both metrics slightly lower than expected). Still, December's 2006 circulation rose just under 15% from November's 1,160,000. That leap of over 170,000 new readers means that in December 2006 FeedBlitz grew by more in one month than it did in all of 2005. For 2006 as a whole, feedblitz.com saw 3.2 million visits and 9.4 million page views.

The Market

FeedBlitz achieved these numbers, in a dynamic business environment, with new competitors arriving (and some leaving). Competition is good - it keeps us focused, spurs innovation, and it demonstrates a healthy market. We raised capital in May, strengthening the company's management as well as its balance sheet. Thank you, Tom.

So we've been successful in 2006 - why? There are several reasons (in no particular order) why I believe FeedBlitz continues to excel as the leader in the RSS and blog to email space.

• Business Models Matter. Ours is real, using the freemium approach, easily understood, easily used, easily justified. We keep it simple and effective.
• Email Matters. Email is so, what, Web 0.2? Yet it's the only reliable, resilient, relevant way to get your messages to any reader anywhere, any time. And email can dramatically boost circulation.
• It's not about RSS. Heresy? Maybe, maybe not. RSS is an enabling technology, maybe the enabling technology of the moment. FeedBlitz succeeds not because of RSS, but because of our application of RSS - and the value we add in the process - to simplifying newsletter generation.
• Focus. Message delivery is what we do, and we try to do it the best. From simple things, such as the automatic table of contents in every email and self-categorizing updates, to the complex, such as having the industry's only integration API, we try to make everything we do go further than you expect.

The Future

More of the same? We're planning for it. Continued rapid subscriber growth, new features, upgrades to existing functionality, and a couple of fun new projects in the works to keep things interesting.

But mostly, whether you're one of our publishers or subscribers, whether you've been here since the early days or just signed up, or even if you're just passing through, I just want to thank you. Thank you for your time, and for allowing us to be part of your online lives in some way, shape or form.

Here's wishing you the very best for 2007.

Cheers,

Phil