Last week I tweeted that I’d not checked my Google Reader account in a month. Well, it turns out that I’m not the only one.
Within minutes, I started getting tweets back from others saying that they rarely check their RSS feeds any more. Instead, people were finding content from other sources including:
- Paper.li
- email subscriptions
- apps (some drew in RSS feeds, but others were recommendation engines)
The decline of RSS?
It struck me just how much things have changed over the last two or three years.
It wasn’t long ago that bloggers were promoting their RSS feeds above all other methods of subscribing to their blogs. Email was dead and RSS was going to be the number one way that people would connect with you.
RSS does continue to drive traffic (at least, my Feedburner stats seem to indicate that) but as I look at my own statistics to see where people are arriving on my sites from, the percentage of those coming from RSS/Feedburner seems to be on the decline. The decline is only slight, but in comparison to the steady increases I saw a few years back, it’s been declining (as a percentage of overall traffic) for me, at least.
Fluctuations in social media traffic
What I do notice is that some sources of traffic fluctuate quite a bit from year to year.
For example, different social media sites have been rather inconsistent. Some months, Twitter can be good, but other months it can be down. Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and other social media sites have provided great influxes of traffic at times; other months, they’re very low.
Some of the traffic levels will depend on the types of content we’re writing, but in other cases, it’s more to do with the rise or decline of the sites themselves (for example, Digg seems to have suffered a lot lately).
Overall, I’ve seen traffic levels...
