How are feed subscribers calculated?

All FeedPress feeds are hosted on our servers in order to be able to record every time it's been accessed by a client. There are three types of clients that usually access your feed:

• Web clients: If someone visits your feed page before subscribing for instance ;
• Individual RSS clients: RSS readers and podcast apps that hit directly the feed from the subscriber's IP address ;
• Hosted platforms: Platforms like Spotify for podcasts or Feedly for RSS feeds.

Your feed subscribers count is therefore based on this data we collect every day in our databases.

To estimate your subscribers count from HTTP hits we aggregate unique clients count on a rolling 7-day period, with the following rule:

• Web clients: Not counted since we assume they're not subscribers ;
• Individual RSS clients: Each IP address is counted as a unique subscriber on the period ;
• Hosted platforms: We take the last subscribers count usually sent by their User-Agent for a single feed ID.

You can learn more about User-Agent collection here.

While there are very basic rules, we also have many specific filters designed to remove bots and crawlers, some examples may be found in IAB Podcast Measurement Guidelines for instance and some are homemade based on our 10 years experience in RSS feed hosting.