Tracking Subscribers from your own Podcast RSS Feed?

[Rendition]

This is Rendition from FirstAdopter.com, I've plugged this site and I'm a big fan.

I have a quick question, my podcast is taking off (I can tell by the bandwidth usage). I've gotten some interest for advertising from a few hardware vendors, so I'm looking for a way to track my podcast subscribers. I don't want to use Feedburner.

Do you know of a service or a piece of code that I can add to my podcast.xml file (my podcast RSS feed) that would let me do that? I'm hoping for a service like SiteMeter or something for podcasters.

Thanks.

[jeffbearer]

You would have to analyze your webserver logs. There won't be any kind of javascript tracking that you can put in your feed, because A) it's xml, and B) podcast aggregators don't run javascript.

So are you back for good, or will you take another 3 month hiatus as soon as I re-subscrbe to your podcast?

[Rendition]

I'm back for good. How do you analyze webserver logs just for my podcast.xml RSS feed?

I also run the main tech news site on the server. Sigh.

[SkepticGuy]

There's a couple ways to do this, but the easiest is to simply set up traffic logging for the podcasts. if you have access to your server's Apache configuration, set up to serve your podcasts from a subdomain (we use podcast.abovetopsecret.com) and write "combined" traffic logs for all activity. Then use Webalizer (or Urchin, Webtrends, etc.) to analyze the traffic.

For example, we know that so far in October, we've had 2,630 unique users grabbing about 61 gigabytes.

However, we have more than one feed, and this only shows us traffic.

[retrocrush]

Yeah, if you have it hosted on your own site with Apache logs, you can see exactly how many times the file was accessed. It's a good ad hoc ratings system to see which of your podcasts are more popular.