Stuart Watson opens with a simple to follow step-by-step plan on how to start measuring RSS and then based on these metrics improve our marketing (e-commerce marketers included) and publishing performance.

Dick Costolo shares concrete aggregate metrics based on Feedburner publishers (based on 60,000+ publishers):

a] 5% a week growth of managed feeds.

b] Existing feeds are growing at about 5% weekly. An amazing growth …

c] Feedburner even manages some feeds with over half a million RSS subscribers, and a great many of feeds with well over a 100,000 subscribers. Yes, there’s a lot of hype surrounding RSS, but with many feeds having greater reach then many traditional newspapers that question no longer seems relevant.

d] Listener growth for podcasting is growing. In Feburary the feeds Feedburner manages had 15 subscribers on average and today they have 65 listeners on average.

f] Clicks (feed-to-site) in relative numbers are falling, anecdotally due to moves to full-text feeds, but no reliable answer at this time yet. Absolute numbers are of course still in high growth.

Dick also shares some of the upgrades Feedburner has planned, and they are currently moving in to tracking exceptions and trends. When they launch, if something exceptional happens, such as a large jump in click for a certain content number, you’ll know about it, and so on …

Dick then unfortunatelly had to leave, but Stuart and I continued the conversation.

Here are the more interesting points:

a] Stuart Watson announces a new feature Syndicate IQ will be offering: Average Daily Readership - getting beyond clicks and views.

In simple terms this means getting an insight in to how many subscribers are consuming how much content on a daily basis (for instance one article at least on a daily basis); and based on this data publishers will be able to see if their subscribers are making a daily effort to consume that content, based on which publishers will be able to see if there is advertising opportunity.

b] The same goes for podcasting. With their new upgrade publishers will not only know how many subscribers they have, but also how many file downloads they are achieving.

c] It’s too early to tell if there are any reliable differences between full-text and summary feeds. So, regardless of what the vocal minorities are saying, this is still a grey area.

d] RSS metrics on the aggregate level aren’t as simple as it seems, because we need to break-down the stats based on content type, content category, brand strength and so on.

e] What marketers need to measure with RSS? Yes, we are finally getting back to lead-generation (no, lead generation is not just for e-mail). And for publishers, it’s more about monetizing content.

Grab the interview here.