Among other things, I'm general manager of the Northwest Public Radio group owned by Washington State University. We have two programmed networks, one with eight stations, the other with five. We were an early broadcast podcaster. Today, I was interviewed about podcasting by two different national newspapers so I took the opportunity to look at our webstats for the first time since Thanksgiving. When last I checked, we'd been podcasting [RSS] local news stories produced by two reporters here and by several others in the Northwest News Network consortium for about three weeks. When last I checked, the RSS page was already in third place among our site's pages, though a distant one. Since we'd done zero on-air promotion of it (do not know if any was done by our partner stations), I was pleased.
Today (that is, for 1/20/05), it was still in third place but it was a close third and over the past week it wsa actually in first place -- the three top page requests being for our home page, our live streaming page, and the RSS page. So RSS is definitely a "phenom" and since we've done nothing to promote it among our core listeners, it must be expanding our listeners.
Overall, if "page requests" is in any way analogous to "cume" (I suspect it measures counts multiple visits in the time period by the same person multiple times; cume doesn't), it's still a small number -- about 4% of our weekly cumulative audience -- but the trendline is amazing. Another caution about these webstats is that it counts news reader bots and doesn't count people who use only the RSS feed but don't visit the web site. --Dennis