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January 19, 2007

Just How Big Is Google Reader?

Michael Arrington

74 comments »

Google’s RSS reader was nothing to write home about when it first launched in October 2005. But the new version, released late last year, has won it accolades and legions of new fans. More than a few people have recently called it the best RSS reader, hands down.

But it’s hard to know exactly how popular it’s gotten. Feedburner doesn’t track it yet, so we can’t compare the subscriber numbers to other readers. We’ve noticed a significant jump in referrals from Google Reader, though. Enough to suggest that it is as large or larger than Bloglines already.

Hitwise says different. In a post tonight comparing the web based readers, they put Bloglines and Rojo firmly ahead of Google Reader. Generally Hitwise seems to be on the money, but something doesn’t add up.

One semi-obvious explanation is that Google Reader requires far fewer page refreshes than Bloglines. This would decrease their page view numbers, but not visits, which is what Hitwise tracks. We may need to wait until Feedburner starts tracking Google Reader directly as well to triangulate its true popularity.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 2:12 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Andy Beard

    January 19th, 2007 at 6:21 am

  2. A Feed Is Born » Is Google Reader the Biggest? - RSS, Webfeeds and Information Overload!

    January 19th, 2007 at 11:48 am

  3. Blogrolle.net : Feedreader-Nutzung

    January 26th, 2007 at 1:21 am

Comments

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  1. Tyler

    January 19th, 2007 at 2:20 am

    I use it every day! Its the best RSS reader for me.

  2. Michael Arrington

    January 19th, 2007 at 2:21 am

    alas, it is down right now though. :-)

  3. Pranav

    January 19th, 2007 at 3:05 am

    I’d say the absolute best reader is to be found offline and with the safari web browser. I used google reader on a few occasions and it crashed the browser - this was quite a few months ago, but I am very happy with safari with no plans to switch.

  4. Yohay Elam

    January 19th, 2007 at 3:15 am

    RSS reader’s natural place is within email software. Yahoo mail already does that, but I guess that most people use Outlook or Outlook Express.
    Michael, do you know how many people get here through RSS reading client software vs. RSS web based readers?

  5. Razvan Antonescu

    January 19th, 2007 at 3:20 am

    The problem is with Google Reader not Feedburner:

    “Google does not currently report the number of subscribers to your feed when it requests the feed, so the number of subscribers you have on Google home or Google Feed reader may be underrepresented by an unknown amount.”

  6. Michael Arrington

    January 19th, 2007 at 3:37 am

    Yahay - If you count Firefox’s reader, its the big majority.

  7. Michael Arrington

    January 19th, 2007 at 3:38 am

    Razvan - yeah, I know. It’s some legacy issue at Google. I believe the Reader team is trying hard to get that fixed.

  8. Chris

    January 19th, 2007 at 3:40 am

    I like the way in Google Reader it helps to share articles with friends and others. I read a previous article that Google Reader with a little tinkering can be like Digg, if they do so it will be interesting, we can great articles there.

  9. Snowbabies

    January 19th, 2007 at 3:56 am

    I moved from Bloglines to Google Reader last year (after reading about the new version through Bloglines!). I’ve tried loads of feed readers and web based is the best for me, flitting between 3 different PC’s all the time.

    I’ve hardly noticed any Google Reader hits on our site, I was begining to think I was their only user!

    Great informative post anyway, it’s nice to see others also like Google Reading like myself.

    Paul.

  10. Kula bácsi

    January 19th, 2007 at 4:15 am

    Frankly I don’t care which is how big.

  11. Bill

    January 19th, 2007 at 4:18 am

    Yeah, popularity for an RSS feed reader is unimportant to me also. I use my own built from open source code - http://www.myownsite.us but I’ve historically preferred http://www.Netvibes.com - where MyOwnSite draws it’s basic layout from.

  12. Sylvain

    January 19th, 2007 at 5:06 am

    Ouch, it seems that Netvibes is seriously going down in the last 3 months. I’m still using it though (even if others have better features). I also like Safari built-in RSS support.

  13. Randall Bennett

    January 19th, 2007 at 5:10 am

    One other note, hitwise may be measuring just reader.google.com, but many users (including myself) use google.com/reader instead. I’d want to see the total numbers from both the subdomain and the subdirectory.

  14. Don M

    January 19th, 2007 at 5:10 am

    I love Google Reader. I used BlogLines for awhile and gave up because it just wasn’t practical. I used the Newsreader in Thunderbird for awhile too, but it had this weird way of pretending like I hadn’t read feeds and resending ALL the feeds from a subscription back to me as new unread feeds. Now Google makes it so easy to keep up I have to actually block the site with an invisibility cloak script to stay productive. -dm

  15. Jonathan Danylko

    January 19th, 2007 at 5:14 am

    Ok, that got me thinking… I hopped over to Google Trends and typed in the same sites. guess what?

    Rojo came out ahead, and Google Reader was gaining steam.

    I thought it was an interesting comparison.

    http://google.com/trends?q=Goo.....C+NetVibes

    Good Friday research :-)

  16. Marcus

    January 19th, 2007 at 5:30 am

    I used bloglines for a couple years (was it that long? since soon after it launched anyway) and ditched it for Google Reader awhile back and haven’t regretted the switch.

    I also wanted to hijack this post to say that navigating TechCrunch has been like mousing through a minefield since all the Snap previews were installed. Is there a way to disable them? It’s incredibly annoying to accidentally leave the mouse cursor somewhere only to have a useless popup come up with a thumbnail of some site that’s too small to get any real info from and just big enough to cover what I’m reading.

  17. Mary Specht

    January 19th, 2007 at 6:02 am

    Why aren’t we all just using Google Homepage? I think it offers a faster glance at the headlines than all of these readers.

  18. Andy Beard

    January 19th, 2007 at 6:24 am

    Mary you obviously don’t subscribe to 200 feeds

    For headlines try Megite, Tailrank or Techmeme

  19. Flash Ripper

    January 19th, 2007 at 6:26 am

    Most of my friends switched from JetBrains Omea to Google reader despite the fact Omea reader became completely free and was favorite reader app for a long time. I did so too.

    I wonder, have you ever tried Omea?

  20. Deepak

    January 19th, 2007 at 6:34 am

    100% Google reader now after trying for months to find a satisfactory solution. THen Google Reader came out and voila, everything was good. I do tend to use the Google Reader Widget for the Google Personalized Homepage as well. Wonder how that impacts page views?

  21. Robert Dewey

    January 19th, 2007 at 6:46 am

    For what it’s worth, Blogspot was down around that time too… It seems like Google has been having some random problems over the past few weeks - not sure if I’d want them to be my OS or anything ;-)

  22. Marshall Kirkpatrick

    January 19th, 2007 at 7:09 am

    Am I the only person who uses a desktop feed reader anymore? NetNewsWire is so much faster than everything online. Plus it works offline for the commute.

  23. tony

    January 19th, 2007 at 7:15 am

    Google reader works pretty well for me but my previous experience was only RSS via Yahoo Mail, which wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t adequate for use with the my Treo.

  24. Peter

    January 19th, 2007 at 7:15 am

    Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that you’re looking at Hitwise’s US ONLY data and comparing it to your own referral logs, which undoubtedly includes traffic from around the world (including the 200+ other countries that are not the US).

    Is it that hard to understand the difference between a US-only number and a global number? It’s a mistake that is made here on TechCrunch more often than not. Seriously Michael, what’s up with that?

  25. DavidW

    January 19th, 2007 at 7:18 am

    I just started using Google Reader last week… mostly as a test to see what the hype was all about. My main reader for the last year or so has been Sage. I love sage. I love the fact that Sage is set off to the left side of my browser and anytime I want to read my feeds I can hit the refresh button and read away. What are other opinions of Sage?

    So far, my impression of Google Reader is a good one…. but the jury is still out on whether or not I will switch solely to GR from Sage.

  26. Louis Gray

    January 19th, 2007 at 7:19 am

    Google Reader has almost completely replaced my need for bookmarks. I’ve gone so far as to stop using NetNewsWire, and I’ve deleted the RSS feeds in Safari.

    If Google Reader isn’t growing as fast as its technology capabilities say it should, it could go back to how Google’s trying to maintain the minimalist homepage. After all it made waves this week as they put a simple ad for Checkout there.

    I hope Google Reader continues to improve. It is the right approach to read feeds across computers and operating systems.

  27. Louis Gray

    January 19th, 2007 at 7:22 am

    Marshall - you make a good point about offline reading of feeds on NetNewsWire. My feeling there is that experience would be dissatisfying, as you couldn’t click through to the Web at all.

    The solution isn’t to bring online feed readers offline. The solution is to bring you online. That’s why ubiquitous high speed wireless access is a must going forward.

  28. Fashion Industry Ceo

    January 19th, 2007 at 7:38 am

    I have noticed a good amount of readers from google readers to my fashion site! so I’m thinking it is taking a turn for the better.

  29. TenHanger

    January 19th, 2007 at 7:48 am

    Google Personalized Home Page has a Google Reader thingy, so I never go to the actual Google Reader page anymore, I just operate within Google Homepage. As Deepak pointed out also, I think this could be a big reason for discrepancies. Something to check.

    Can you guys count the upstream traffic to your sites from Google Home Page, or does that just appear like it’s coming from Google Search? (since technically the Personalized Home Page is just rejiggered Search page).

  30. AskMrVideo

    January 19th, 2007 at 8:01 am

    Are we also counting the reader Google has in it’s Google Home Page (ig)?
    I have rss feeds embedded into my page and find this to be the best way to see what’s going on without a lot of fuss. If a headline warants, I click!

  31. Robert Dewey

    January 19th, 2007 at 8:03 am

    Marshall,

    I use Sage which is an extension of Firefox. It caches everything offline as well… I’ll never go back to a web-based RSS reader.

  32. Jeton

    January 19th, 2007 at 8:05 am

    I’m really wondering how come a RSS reader that is simple, easy to use and has a great UI as Newshutch.com doesn’t have so many fans?

  33. Oliver Dueck

    January 19th, 2007 at 8:16 am

    I recently made the switch from Safari to Firefox, and the one thing I miss about Safari is the RSS reader. Looks like I will have to try Google Reader and see if it is an appropriate replacement.

  34. Matthew Kanwisher

    January 19th, 2007 at 8:18 am

    Heh I saw this article in my google reader ;) I’m never going back to a desktop reader its just far to convenient.

  35. mrshl

    January 19th, 2007 at 8:21 am

    I too love Google reader, but often as not I access it through Gmail using a nice Greasemonkey Script that adds Feeds to the left hand Gmail menu. Get it here.

    http://persistent.info/archive.....ader-redux

    It works so well, I wouldn’t be surprised if Gmail + Google Reader is integrated more officially soon. Then you’ll really see a spike in Google Readership.

  36. Alex

    January 19th, 2007 at 9:31 am

    Here is my usage pattern of Google Reader. I have it opened on the first tab of Firefox (other tabs GMail, Google Calendar and Google/ig) and it stays open like this for weeks - I’m reading it daily for at least an hour.
    Same setup on home and work computer.
    How many visits HitWise count from me over those weeks. One?

  37. Jordan Ryan Moore

    January 19th, 2007 at 9:36 am

    The report form Hitwise shows Google Reader’s hostname as “reader.google.com”; however, I just realized that the URL I’m using to view Google Reader is “google.com/reader”. This is one good reason for the stats to be “off”.

    Also, a lot of people view Google’s personalized homepage to use Google Reader.

  38. NJG from NYC

    January 19th, 2007 at 10:17 am

    I’m still with Bloglines; I’m comfortable with the service, I like the integration with Firefox, and I also use Bloglines to power the blogroll on my site.

    Bloglines would have to start sucking pretty mightily for me to seriously look elsewhere.

  39. Ryan

    January 19th, 2007 at 10:44 am

    Google reader is perfect for someone like me, who wants to read my feeds where ever i go. I can use it in the office, at home on my 2 computer and at my girlfriend’s place. Google reader is a little hard to find from the google homepage as well.

  40. Jacki

    January 19th, 2007 at 10:49 am

    I just discovered Google Reader recently, and LOVE it! I subscribed to a bunch of their “bundles” and am reading about tons of stuff now that I probably otherwise wouldn’t have thought to check out.

  41. LeeAnn Prescott

    January 19th, 2007 at 10:51 am

    To Randall Bennett and Jordan Ryan Moore:

    Traffic to http://www.google.com/reader aggregated to reader.google.com, so the data on Google Reader is representative.

    I want to point out that most of the readers of Techcrunch could be considered early adopters, and the general Internet population represented in the Hitwise sample of 10 million US users is much slower to move to new websites, let alone subscribing to RSS.

  42. Corey

    January 19th, 2007 at 10:59 am

    personally i movedfrom google reader to newshutch. i check reader every once in a while to make sure im not missing anything. i still prefer newshutch. it also surprises me they dont get more attn. smaller budget i guess.

  43. Chris

    January 19th, 2007 at 11:18 am

    Is it just me, or has it not been working in Opera/Flock/Firefox for the last several days? Works fine in IE.

    -Chris

  44. Victor

    January 19th, 2007 at 11:48 am

    I use Google Reader and Spokeo regularly. Google Reader for blogs, and Spokeo for my friends’ content. I like Google Reader’s functionalities better, but it doesn’t work with social networks.

  45. Peter

    January 19th, 2007 at 11:58 am

    i’m not a power rss reader yet, so google reader works well for me - though, i could already use a search feature.

    i’m also excited to see what integrations google reader cooks up next. after getting to know google calendar better over the past couple of weeks, i’m convinced that google is going to continue to up my productivity in any number of ways. i’ve been scheduling a lot of interviews lately, and i’d like to be able to click a date/time and have it plop into my calendar. and already, you can send a google calendar invite to someone, and if they use gmail, then it’s just an ajax call - without leaving your gmail window, of course - to rsvp (yes, no, or maybe) for that particular event. this is killer stuff.

    google reader, to me, seems typical of a lot of google’s stuff. little to no hype - they just get stuff done, and then, before any of us knows it - boom - we’re awash in google’s latest product offering - the levees have broken - and google’s product offering has just swept us up and away - like a slow-moving tsunami - not initially so threatening-looking, but if you’ve watched some of those tsunami videos - you know it’s an unstoppable force - how’s that for a run-on sentence?

  46. Dave Zatz

    January 19th, 2007 at 12:27 pm

    I made the jump from Bloglines about a month ago. I can be much more efficient in the Google interface, and since much of my reading is ‘work’ the value of time is high. The color scheme is a bit of a distraction (especially the sidebar) and I miss the favicon.ico from Bloglines, but UI speed takes precedence.

  47. Matthew Berman

    January 19th, 2007 at 12:36 pm

    Hey Mike,

    This is my first post but i read your site often.

    I personally don’t like the google reader for some reason, I like having it bookmarked right in firefox.

    Also, I did not see firefox mentioned on that graph…did i miss it?

    Thanks,

    Matt

  48. Christoph H.

    January 19th, 2007 at 1:20 pm

    In the first days of the Google Reader, I checked it out and didn’t like it. I decided to keep on using Bloglines, which is still a great tool. But since Google released the big update, I prefer the Reader. The shortcuts, the layout and many other things are well done. Additionally, it’s quite fine to have online one login for email, calendar, rss and all the other products by google I’m using.

  49. Jess

    January 19th, 2007 at 2:28 pm

    I use Netvibes as my homepage and RSS source and I do not like the fact that I have to refresh Google Reader to see my latest feeds. I just always go back to my Netvibes tab and know exactly how many new feeds I have, without having to hit refresh. It may seem trivial, but efficiency is everything to me. I would really like the Google homepage and reader to be my main online hub, but it’s just not customizable enough to really fit my needs quite yet.

  50. Michael Arrington

    January 19th, 2007 at 3:10 pm

    Matthew - even though it’s non-obvious, firefox reader is actually a desktop reader, there’s no web site.

  51. Gregor J. Rothfuss

    January 19th, 2007 at 3:14 pm

    I switched to Google Reader because it is faster than my local application.

  52. Dave Conrey

    January 19th, 2007 at 3:16 pm

    I found this post as I was writing my own link post. Oddly, I’m not using Google Reader, but I’ve been thinking about switching from Bloglines to Google because I do so much other stuff inside Google. Keep it in the family, right?

  53. Janette Toral

    January 19th, 2007 at 5:08 pm

    I use Bloglines as a primary tool. However, I’m using Google Reader as an investment for my existing blogs as it allows me to share and tag keywords for each entry. I’d like to believe that it can also be helpful in terms of attaining better search engine visibility - once it gets to be much more integrated with the Google search engine. (of course, that idea may not be valid at all)

  54. joey

    January 19th, 2007 at 5:23 pm

    I’m really hoping that google reader will soon support authentication for those feeds that require credentials.

  55. Nick Gonzalez

    January 19th, 2007 at 6:05 pm

    @ flash ripper - I use omea. has some shortcomings but seems to handle filtering and the massive amounts of feeds well.

  56. Chris Messina

    January 19th, 2007 at 6:56 pm

    Just a point of clarification on the Rojo spike… It seems as though Sep 18 they changed their robots.txt file from this:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /

    To this:

    User-agent: MSIECrawler Disallow: /

    So it’s important to put it into perspective what content is actually showing on these sites — and what’s driving traffic — stuff that’s public or stuff that’s private or hidden away from bots.

    Bloglines, meanwhile, is very generous:

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /preview

    Google Reader, except where it comes to XHTML output, is not.

  57. James Clark

    January 19th, 2007 at 7:53 pm

    I switched to Google Reader from NewsFire. I love the “share” feature in Google reader. It helps with our team to divide and conquer staying current.

    I wish it was a better podcatcher though. I love how NewsFire works as and syncs with iTunes.

  58. xxdesmus

    January 19th, 2007 at 8:25 pm

    It will take something truly ground breaking to get me to switch from Netvibes. It does EXACTLY what I want.

  59. Bob

    January 19th, 2007 at 9:02 pm

    It’s slow to me, the reason I find Google is rushing products to market without Interoperability.

  60. Don

    January 19th, 2007 at 9:12 pm

    I’ve switched over to Google Reader. I feel it’s the best web based RSS reader out there. I don’t have to worry about installing some third party software on my computer and worry about it crashing.

    Use it, love it

    Don

  61. Steve

    January 19th, 2007 at 9:22 pm

    I used google homepage for RSS feeds, but when I found out about netvibes, I haven’t used google reader since. Netvibes is so much better than google’s homepage. Google’s isn’t nearly as user friendly.

  62. Django Bliss

    January 19th, 2007 at 10:24 pm

    I switched to it about 1 year ago… maybe longer. It wasn’t the best back then, but their upgrades have grow to fit the needs I have for an RSS reader. I wouldn’t stand for a desktop reader which would require me to import my list from computer to computer I’m on. And it allows easy integration with the other Googly services that I’m already using.

  63. Stetson Roller

    January 20th, 2007 at 12:53 am

    I prefer reading it with firefox’s inbuilt and there’s no real way to track users using FIrefox, which is why I prefer it.

  64. Lelia Katherine Thomas

    January 20th, 2007 at 6:46 am

    I read this via Google Reader. I only recently switch to it, but I find it so intuitive that I don’t find myself switching to something else anytime soon. I tried doing the personal software thing for a while, but that bombed for me. I like having something online that I can access anywhere.

  65. jon

    January 20th, 2007 at 9:28 am

    Is there any reason to assume that anyone outside of Google can tell us how many people are using the reader?

    It’s not like each GoogleReader instance is a client which connects to the site everytime someone logs into the app to read some rss feeds.

    I’m not any kind of expert on how it works, of course, but I’m sure they cache all kinds of stuff on their end.

    Let’s say there are 1000 people on GoogleReader who subscribe to a given blog. It’s not like that blog is going to receive significantly more traffic from GoogleReader than if they had just 10 readers. Or 100,000, for that matter.

  66. Christopher Johnston

    January 20th, 2007 at 9:29 am

    I discovered RSS feeds by using Google Reader and I personally wouldn’t switch. I also love that Firefox will ask me if I want to add a feed to Google Reader when click on a feed url.
    The main reason I wouldn’t switch though is that I don’t want to learn a new product. I think that this may also be the one reason it’s lagging behind.

  67. Rock

    January 20th, 2007 at 12:07 pm

    I finally made the full jump to Google Reader after I noticed Bloglines consistently breaking down (in the last 3 months) in the most important aspect of RSS feeds, reliable updates. This was across all of my 100+ feeds so I knew it wasn’t a fluke from the sites themselves. You’d think after doing it for 4 years they would have things like that hammered out, but apparently not. Combine that with the fact that they’ve been treading water for the longest time, finally have a real competitor with the Google Reader redesign and you’ve made a defector from a 3+ year bloglines user.

  68. Phil

    January 20th, 2007 at 2:50 pm

    One thing that may be skewing the results slightly in Bloglines’ favour is that Bloglines uses a frameset; the initial load is 3 pages views, and the lefthand frame reloads itself periodically, so it likely generates more total page views than Google Reader for the same amount of browsing activity.

  69. Jonathan Orlev

    January 21st, 2007 at 3:16 am

    As long as Google Reader does not have both:
    1. Build in search option
    2. The option to get prompts when a new feeds from a given subscription arrives via email and instant messaging.

    I really don’t think it is a good choice for me and many others.

  70. 3Monkeys

    January 21st, 2007 at 11:13 am

    I just switched over to Google Reader. I had been using RSS Ticker in Firefox for quite sometime, but wanted to organize my feeds better. Overall the experience has been great so far. I’ve had a few complaints, however.

  71. Wise Bread

    January 29th, 2007 at 9:27 pm

    I notice a lot of commenters use NetVibes, but no one has mentioned the speed. I tried NetVibes for the last couple of months in ‘06, but just couldn’t get over how s-l-o-w it was. Was that just me?

    GR not only loads faster, but I actually get through the feeds faster using the keyboard shortcuts.

    As for desktop readers, I’m done with them. Anything that is locked down to one computer — browser bookmarks, POP mail, feed subscriptions — forget about it. It’s just too damn painful to maintain the same configs across 3 computers plus a couple of mobile devices. Del.icio.us and GR all the way!

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