The Holiday Traffic Drop

A few people have asked why the blog RSS readership dropped below 1,000 over the Christmas holiday. The answer should be pretty obvious, but for the new webmasters experiencing their first holiday on the Internet, it may seem like a crash.

The holidays are only financially good for retailers and E-tailers. It’s not good for content based sites, which is what this blog is. There are simply less people online during the holiday season. It’s the same reason why traffic is lower on the weekends – think of the holidays as a one week long weekend. People are either spending time with friends and family or they’re out shopping for after Christmas bargains.

The traffic drop can be quite drastic but no one would have noticed it if I didn’t have a FeedBurner RSS counter which shows how many people subscribed to this blog. The counter dropped from 1,300 into the 800’s on Christmas day. A little explanation on how the FeedBurner counter works is in order.

The number the counter displays is not how many people have subscribed to the RSS feed. The counter shows the number of people who use RSS to access the blog yesterday. Right now, the number is 1,148. That means that 1,148 people use their RSS to read this blog yesterday. If nobody uses RSS to read the blog today, the counter will display zero tomorrow. The neat thing about the RSS counter is that it mirrors blog traffic. If the RSS numbers are up, chances are overall blog traffic is up.

I don’t expect traffic to return to normal levels until after the New Year. Christmas maybe over, but we’re still on holidays. This will have a negative effect on blog income. However, I still expect to be able to beat last month’s income level. I’ll report on that next year.