Pheedo just made my week by releasing some basic data on their publishers' and advertisers' RSS usage data, becoming one of the first vendors to establish some introductionary RSS benchmarks.

Here's a quick summary, plus our comments ...

a] RSS is most actively used (click-throughs, viewership, feed retrieval) on Tuesdays and least on Saturdays. CTR differs as high as 70% between these two days. The next best day is Wednesday.

Based on just this data it seems that Tuesday morning might be the best day for releasing your key news and content to achieve maximum readership, although testing would be needed to confirm this.

It's however clear that Saturday is not a good day for important notifications or other key content.

b] Most content is viewed by "morning scanners", but late-night readers click more.

This piece of data gives an indication that it might be a good idea to keep your "conversion content" (the content you are using in any way to convert readers in to customers) at the top of your feed throughout the day, no matter how much you post on any single day.

In simpler terms, if you released a key content item throughout the day, make sure that it's always listed on the top by manipulating the publishing date.

Some users however might resent this, since RSS is right now still fundamentally "time oriented", meaning that users expect the top item in the feed to be the latest published.

Just like with the interpretation above, this requires some testing.

c] CTR (click-through ratio) ranges from 7 to 11%, depending on the hour of the day.

Some more information would be needed to comment on this, especially how CTR is calculated and especially if these numbers are the average for individual publishers.

However, this data does show that RSS is performing better in terms of CTRs than e-mail.

d] Bloglines is the most used RSS aggregator, according to Pheedo's statistics, and followed by Firefox, Thunderbird, NewsGator and Sharpreader.

Take a look at some more interesting observations and data on Pheedo's site.

For more information about RSS metrics and some marketing oriented hard data take a look at our RSS Metrics category, and the RSS Statistics category for more RSS usage data.