How You Read My Content (The Answers)
Two days ago I published a simple survey asking how you read the content I put out on this site. Here's the results of that survey.
Originally I was going to leave the survey running for at least a week, but after less than 48 hours, I received an email from Zoho telling me I’d hit the monthly response limit of 500 responses. If I wanted more responses, I’d have to pay.
Nah. 500 responses is enough to give me a good indication on how people consume my content, so I was good with that. Also, 500 responses in less than 48 hours is bloody brilliant. Assuming only a small proportion of readers actually responded (as that’s usually the case with these things) that means there’s a healthy number of you reading my waffle, so thank you!
The results
The survey simply asked “how do you read the content I put out on this site?” and there were a handful of options for responses:
- RSS
- Mastodon / Fediverse
- Occasionally visit the site
- Something else
If someone selected the last option, a text field would appear asking for more info. There were a few people who used this option, but all were covered by the other options. People just wanted to add some nuance, or leave a nice message. ❤
So I updated all the something else responses to be one of the other 4 options, and here’s the results:
A highly accurate pie chart
| Option | Responses | % |
|---|---|---|
| RSS | 421 | 84.5% |
| Masto/Fedi | 38 | 7.6% |
| Visitor | 27 | 5.4% |
| 12 | 2.4% |
What this tells me?
Well, quite a lot, actually. It tells me that there’s loads of you fine people reading the content on this site, which is very heart-warming. It also tells me that RSS is by far the main way people consume my content. Which is also fantastic, as I think RSS is very important and should always be a first class citizen when it comes to delivering content to people.
I was surprised at how small the number was for Mastodon, too. I have a fair number of followers over there (around 13,000 according to Fosstodon) so I was expecting that number to be a bigger slice of the pie.
Clearly people follow me there more for the hot takes than my waffle. 🙃
This was a fun little experiment, even if it did end more quickly than I would have liked. Thanks to all ~500 of you who responded, really appreciate it.
See, you don’t need analytics to get an idea of who’s reading your stuff and how.