RSS Traffic Statistics and Kindle Obsolescence

Since I took two steroid pills yesterday, I, of course, woke up at 5 this morning, ready to go-go-go at full speed before I have to trundle off to my chemo treatment mid-morning.

I learned two new things out of yesterday’s Blaugust Discord.

RSS Traffic

The topic of whether to enable full text on RSS feeds came up. I’ve always enabled full text since time immemorial. After it became clear that blogging wasn’t ever going to be my day job, there wasn’t any need for me to try to nudge people to go to my web site. But that’s a different topic.

I’ve never heard anything but anecdotal evidence about whether a blogger should or shouldn’t put full text in their RSS feeds. The only hard evidence I’ve ever seen is the traffic patterns on my own web site, and out of curiosity I asked Antigravity to query AWS to find out how much of my traffic goes to the RSS feed as opposed to the actual web articles.

It turns out that in the four days prior to the query, 88% of my traffic came from fetching the RSS feed, which matched my expectations based on previous statistics. According to Antigravity, the top 5 RSS readers are NetNewsWire, FreshRSS, Miniflux, Feedly, and NewsBlur. I’ve never heard of two of those.

Of the remaining non-RSS web page requests, Antigravity reported that 57% came from search bots. The top search bots were, in order from highest to lowest: Bytespider, Googlebot, Bingbot, Amazonbot, AhrefsBot, ClaudeBot, GPTGot, PetalBot, SemrushBot, and Applebot.

Of the remaining 43% of non-RSS traffic, 75% is direct instead of things like click-throughs or internal links. “Direct” meaning someone typed in an URL or used a bookmark. That’s way higher than I would have expected, but it turns out that RSS reader click-throughs usually don’t send a Referer header so they would also count as direct.

Of my direct traffic about 40% is to the home page and about 15% is distributed among the last couple of posts I did. The rest goes to category pages for some unknown reason.

To summarize traffic for four days, July 16-20:

• RSS feed: 88%
• Web Site: 12%
  • Search bots: 57%
  • Humans: 43%
    • Direct (or maybe RSS click-throughs): 75%
    • Search click-throughs: 14%
    • Internal links: 7.5%

And I checked: Traffic from me personally only accounted for 0.074% of total traffic.

AI can give you super detailed stats if it has access to your raw access logs.

Anyway that’s why I tend to write and format my blog for mainly an RSS audience and secondarily a Google click-through audience. I want the web site to make a decent impression to first-time visitors from Google, but it doesn’t have much of any features to make it a place people live day-to-day.

Kindle Obsolescence

The other thing I learned yesterday, to my surprise, is that my older Kindle Paperwhite e-ink reader can no longer download and display books from my Amazon account. I actually didn’t think it was that old, but I got it in 2012. Oh well. Bricked now, even though it still works perfectly fine.

Luckily I had gotten a Kindle Fire tablet in 2024 and that one still works.

I’m going to use it to read Dungeon Crawler Carl while waiting at the doctor today. I got it last week because I had seen a million billion people talking about it. I kept looking at the description of the book and thinking, “There’s no way I’m going to like this book,” but world-wide peer pressure is a powerful force.

I’m deliberately reading the text of the book for two reasons: 1) I haven’t actually read a book that way for quite a while, and 2) I want to evaluate the book on the merits of the writing.

Normally I buy audiobooks, because they’re just more convenient for me, but I’ve learned over the years that a good audiobook performance can elevate let’s charitably say average writing to a much more entertaining level, which is undoubtedly why audiobooks are so popular. (Though surprisingly, ChatGPT is telling me that only 25% of book sales are audiobooks… I would have thought it would be up to 75% by now.)

I’ve read a bit of DCC already and I can confidently say that the audiobook is probably going to be more entertaining. Let’s just say I started skimming on page 2. It reads like a Reddit post banged out by someone who was drunk one night, however I should admit that I’m applying the rigorous critical standards of Harry Harrison’s Stainless Steel Rat first person sarcastic “I guy” books to this one, which is outrageously unfair.

I don’t know the history of DCC but reading it kind of makes me mad. If this was the standard of super popular books when I was in my twenties and thirties, I might have made a more serious effort to write and publish. Foolish me thinking I still had to write to the standards of the 70s and 80s. I remember when everyone made fun of Dan Brown’s writing. How quaint that seems now.

The LitRPG genre in particular makes me mad, because one of my NaNoWriMo drafts was about an NPC in an MMORPG. I thought it was dumb and didn’t work when I wrote it, because I was trying to be serious instead of comedic. Now there’s Epic NPC Man YouTube videos from Viva La Dirt League and an entire massively popular genre about people being trapped in RPGs. Ugh.

Anyway that’s my max one hour time limit. Way too many words to vomit out at this time of day.