How the author knows its website has hundreds of subscribers? AFAIK is not possible to identify subscribers to RSS feeds and counting hits won't help. Am I missing something here?
Hi! Some feed aggregators include the subscriber count in the User-Agent header, so I can pick these counts from the access logs and add them up. This is how the logs look:
Picking a few days of logs where the subscriber count has not changed much, I get a rough estimate of the total count of subscribers reported by the feed readers like this:
In case anyone is wondering why we see multiple entries for Feedly and Feedbin in the first log snippet, that's because in an older design of my website, I had multiple sections each serving its own feed at paths like /blog/feed.xml, /maze/feed.xml, etc. Later I consolidated all of them into a unified feed at /feed.xml. So the feed readers still hit the old feed URLs and then get redirected to the unified feed URL.
You can get a rough estimate based on unique IPs hitting the RSS feed. Moreover, some of the online feed readers report the number of subscribers of your feed as part of their User-Agent. An example from my blog logs: `"Feedbin feed-id:2688376 - 9 subscribers"`
In my own logs, the ones that show are Feedly, Inoreader, Newsblur, Feedbin, The Old Reader, and a few small/personal ones.
Of course, they only show the subscriber count for their own platform. And then you can also pool together all the separate requests fetching /feed/ and add it all up.
