NY Times: their RSS growth on the exponential

SilliconValleyWatcher comments on a The NY Times press release claiming a 342% annual increase in RSS click-throughs on their site..

"It's interesting to look at how the RSS click-throughs for March 2005 compares to the total traffic for that month. The Times reported 5.9 million pageviews from RSS and there were a total of 555 million pageviews for the whole website. So that equates to a little over 1% of the whole site's traffic. A drop in the ocean, in terms of bare figures.

But when you consider that traffic for the whole website only grew by 17% over the past year, whereas the RSS click-throughs grew by 342% in that same period... well you begin to see how RSS is going to be a key driver in growth for the NY Times. Strategically, that's how the NY Times will view this."

Here's a thought. Assuming continued gowth of 332% for RSS click-throughs, the RSS-driven pageviews on the site would grow from 5.9m in the last year, to 19.6m in the next, 67m in the next and 229m within three years, roughly representing 27% of the total PVs. I'm sad, and I did the math:

(numbers in millions)	Yearly growth %	Year -1	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3
RSS Driven PVs	342.0	5.9	19.6	67.0	229.1
Total PVs	17.0	555.0	649.4	743.7	838.1
RRS Driven PVs as % of total PVs	-	1.1	3.0	9.0	27.3

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 19, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  June 25, 2005
  Seattle Times quotes Scott Gatz, the senior director for personalization products at Yahoo in reaction...