Re: [syndication] Accounting for aggregated views

[Rick Bradley <roundeye@roundeye.net>]

* Dimitri Glazkov (dimitri.glazkov@gmail.com) [040625 14:25]:
> Imagine a portal application, which uses RSS to aggregate information
> from various Internet sources. Obviously, in order to improve
> performance, the application only reads the source of syndication once
> in a specified interval and then delivers the cached data by request
> to the portal users.
> 
> If I am an owner of the content that is syndicated in this way, my
> statistics will look rather skewed -- I can only see one hit every so
> often, and the fact that my content is viewed somewhere else by
> multiple viewers is completely hidden from me. Sounds mighty unfair,
> doesn't it? Almost like bootlegging.
> 
> Are there any efforts to correct this injustice? Any methods? Ideas?

Au contraire!  Most of us are looking for ways to reduce the traffic to
our syndication feeds, and many of us have considered means (client-side
or server-side) to reduce the number of hits inbound to our sites.

For everyone with whom I've discussed this matter traffic is a cost
center and not a revenue center.  If perhaps you're equating traffic
with visitors for the purposes of ad revenue then you might consider how
poor an indicator of readership traffic really is.  Over time this is
likely to become even more true.  

I'd recommend finding another means to more accurately count your
readership than hit counts -- one which represents someone else
shouldering the bandwidth burden as what it really is:  doing you a
favor by building your reputation without costing you $.

Rick
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