[myfonj]

> RSS traffic trickled down to almost nothing.

Could you elaborate how you measured that?

While Google trends depicts decline in search frequency so it may correlate with actual usage, it could as well mean that the "RSS market" is stable and saturated ("everybody know about it, so no need to search for it").

If you came to this conclusion while looking at your access logs, keep in mind that single request from some web-based reader could "feed" hordes of subscribers. In scenario desktop RSS readers were completely abandoned and everybody used web-based RSS reading services, there would be just ~ services count × their check frequency requests, from which it would be really hard to abstract subscriber count, I guess.

Maybe there is exact way to determine this usage I'm not aware of? Are those services telling back subscribers count in their requests? Or do they publish this information in some standardized way? I really would like to know…

[nl]

Back when RSS was a thing cloud based readers pass on the number of readers when requesting the feed. Analytics software would use this.

I'd be surprised if this has completely atrophied away.

[ddrager]

Which analytics software uses this? We primarily use Google Analytics, the user agent from the web server log file isn't getting passed back to them.

[nl]

No Javascript analytics software can do this. It has to be log based.