There's a ton of selection bias going on here. Terence writes mostly about open web standards and topics that would be of significant interest to folks with an RSS feed reader.
Also, RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read. Like a podcast "listen" is actually just an automated download, RSS traffic does not necessarily involve anyone actually reading the article, whereas search traffic is generally high intent and is at least resulting in eyeballs on the site, if not actual readers.
>There's a ton of selection bias going on here.
The data doesnt purport to cover any more than the 1 website. Its not like there are any generalisations about other websites derived from the data. Its just "These are where my hits come from"
> RSS readers are generally automated. I know I've had them around for years pulling in articles that I never read
They try to address that
> I added RSS and Newsletter tracking. These data are very lossy. If someone is subscribed to my RSS feed and opens a post and their client downloads a lazy-loaded image at the end of the post, I get a hit.
Right, I'd say RSS numbers (for a given blog post) mostly reflect cumulative visitors over the lifetime of the RSS feed while number of clicks coming in from a search engine reflect instantaneous popularity.
Same pattern as say a sub-reddit subscriber count compared to the number of nicks currently in an associated IRC channel, though IRC lurkers soften that distinction.