I am playing around with a new web site stats package called SmarterStats Pro, which is free for a single site. So far I like it, lots of really powerful reports.
I took some time tonight to look at some stats on the site, and there was one chart in particular that really stood out.
Have a look at this chart, which lists the top 10 User Agents for the month of November (the User Agent is the program my audience is using to access the web site. Internet Explorer, for instance, is a user agent):
Where do you think Internet Explorer lands on this list? Would it surprise you to know it's #4? Would it surprise you to know that IE is in fact the only traditional web browser that made it into the Top 10 at all? Yes, 9 out of the top 10 programs used to read bmonday(dot)com are RSS readers of some fashion (FeedReader is top with 35%, then it's NewsGator at about 25%, and SharpReader coming in 3rd with about 15%). Over 80% of my web traffic comes from RSS readers. This really surprised me.
And here I was worried about the havoc images in my blogs entries play on my right-hand column. 80% of my readers never even see that crap!
It takes a chart like this one to really put into perspective the impact RSS is having on the web.