Tonight’s Jaw-Droppingly Stunning Statistic Award Goes To….

Filed in Statistics by Matt McGee on March 19, 2007 2 Comments

Think about this for a moment. Don’t scroll down.

What percent of domains have an RSS feed?

Think……………

Is it:

20%?

40%?

50%

More?

…………….

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a web site I visit frequently that doesn’t have an RSS feed. Well, if you’re like that, too, you and I apparently visit a very unique subset of the web. According to Domain Tools, only 3% of domains have self-discoverable RSS feeds. Crazy! Jay Westerdal explained it on their blog tonight:

We asked the question, “how many domains have an RSS feed?” In search of the answer to this question, we crawled all the domains we know about (80 million or so) and found that a small fraction of domains have feeds, just under 3% of domains have self discoverable RSS feeds.

I’m sure there’s a small business marketing lesson somewhere in there, something to do with how RSS can help your linkbuilding efforts … but I’m too stunned to put the pieces together on that one right now. 3-freakin-%?

Oh, Jay also announces that Domain Tools is now showing RSS feeds on all whois pages.

[tags]rss, seo[/tags]

Comments (2)

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  1. st0n3y says:

    But not all domains need an RSS feed.

    Many (most?) sites are simply not updated frequently enough (nor do they need to be updated frequenly) to warrant an RSS feed. But maybe I’m just not seeng outside my box.

  2. Matt McGee says:

    I hear what you’re saying, and generally agree. I’m not shocked that it’s less than 50% — I’m shocked at HOW MUCH less it is. I would’ve guessed 20%, especially with the incredible amount of blogs that are being created every day. (Then again, a high percentage of those are run off some other domain, so they wouldn’t show up separately in the search Domain Tools did….)

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