RSS management megavendor FeedBurner released an interesting report this morning about the relative market shares of the various leading RSS reader vendors. The statistics go beyond mere subscription numbers and focus on what FeedBurner says is more important - reader engagement.
That engagement is measured in two ways, the number of times the feed’s items are loaded and displayed in the reader (called views) and the number of times a feed’s link is clicked through (called clicks). TechCrunch, for example, may now have almost 300,000 people subscribed to its feed who log on to their feed reader in a given day - but only a portion of those people view the TechCrunch feed in particular on a given day. I know I’m subscribed to many feeds that I almost never actually read, FeedBurner’s engagement metrics try to parse that behavior out from active readership.
The winning vendors in reader engagement are interesting but so are the larger implications of the numbers being reported. Full details and discussion below the fold (for those not viewing this in a feed reader, that is!)
The moral of the story is that Google Reader has come out of nowhere and stolen the hearts of active RSS users.
Views
When it comes to views, Google Reader is the clear leader with a methodologically conservative 59% of views. That means that 59% of the time a FeedBurner published feed is being displayed in a web based aggregator - it’s being displayed in a Google Reader account. That’s amazing. Google Reader just began reporting subscriber numbers to FeedBurner last week. Bloggers everywhere saw their subscriber numbers jump an average of 53% according to FeedBurner. Now this statistic indicating that Google users are actually accessing the feeds they have subscribed to far more than any other vendor shows that in just a short period of time since the product’s relaunch - Google Reader owns the online feed reading market.
Bloglines, perhaps unsurprisingly, is in second place on views at 33%. Newsgator online, a feature fantastic service long plagued with deal-breaking performance problems, is trailing in third place with a mere %3 of views. The company’s desktop feed readers, NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, probably have a much larger percentage of views as they are older, more stable products. Newsgator is also the only one of the top feed readers in the chart with an enterprise feed reading product, which is undoubtedly the company’s focus - though the enterprise market has been slow to adopt RSS. (Update: NNW and FeedDemon sync up with Newsgator online and thus are counted here - which is a bad sign. For the record, I prefer NetNewsWire and Netvibes used together.) (UpdateX2: Newsgator’s Greg Reinacker contests much of this report and says that Feedburner’s stats in this report are very limited.)
Other interesting numbers when it comes to views are that Netvibes and Live.com are the only Start Pages that register on the charts. Netvibes, tellingly, scores three times higher than Microsoft’s Live.com - which is supposed to be the StartPage for computer users everywhere.
Clicks
The second statistic offered by FeedBurner this morning is click throughs. I don’t believe that statistic means much at all - some publishers don’t offer full feeds and require a click through to read the full text of an item but the most lovable ones don’t. The difference in user behavior between a StartPage like MyYahoo and a full text reader like Google, Bloglines or Newsgator makes comparing click throughs between these two classes of readers a matter of apples and oranges. Unsurprisingly, MyYahoo drives the majority of all RSS click throughs (54%) - MyYahoo has a huge user base and there’s no other way to read anything in the service other than clicking through. Google Reader is in second place, probably as a consequence of its huge numbers and engagement via views.
Feed Diversity
The final statistic in the report is the percentage of FeedBurner’s active feeds are subscribed to by each user agent. At 76%, Google Reader users clearly subscribe to the widest breadth of feeds from FeedBurner. MyYahoo is in third place behind Bloglines in this metric at 51% - that means that 49% of FeedBurner published feeds don’t have a single MyYahoo reader. Firefox Live Bookmarks and IE 7 score a 33% and 21% respectively. In other words, browser based feed reading isn’t very substantial and it isn’t very diverse.
Conclusions
What sorts of RSS user behavior isn’t being measured here? There’s no recognition of mobile feed reading, possibly in part because most of the products available on the market are generally anemic and little used. It’s also important to remember that there are many types of feeds that aren’t being counted in this survey. Desktop feed readers, including iTunes for media reading, isn’t included here. FeedBurner tends to work with bog and news feeds - but there are a million other possible uses of RSS. From search query feeds to weather information to package tracking - for all its market reach there are many important feeds that FeedBurner does not manage and thus cannot track.
The truth is though that RSS use is still in its infancy and the vast majority of use cases are likely covered in FeedBurner’s analysis. This report makes me hunger for more data over time.
The most immediate message here though may be that when it comes to reader engagement and sheer numbers, Google Reader has come from no where and is now indisputable champion in this market. Bloglines and to some degree MyYahoo are important and Netvibes is doing admirably. Everyone else is a relatively minor player in the web based consumer feed reading market.
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I chose not to use feedburner, I’ve played around with it and I really don’t see a huge benefit to me. Sure they provide awesome feed statistics but I don’t need them right now.
Maybe one day I’ll switch over.
Dagnabit.
Damn Marshall, it seems like you were drooling or salivating when you saw this analysis.
The improved Google Reader is definitely great. I like the option for only the list or expanded view, plus the ability to sort feeds with the use of folders. Plus the expanded view can let you see any embeded videos.
I had used the MyYahoo in the past, but it doesn’t compare to Google Reader. Also, I still use Firefox’s bar alot for the feeds I most use.
Roll your own reader - http://www.myownsite.us
Any suggestions on the best method of open sourcing what I’ve got?
You can find additional data released last night on the impact of the Google Reader at http://www.pheedo.info/archives/000401.html
We looked the impact of Google Reader across different categories. We also define market share by users and penetration across feed readers.
Cheers,
Bill Flitter
Pheedo
That’s really surpising.
I do love it however when companies try to coin new terms such as feed “engagement” lol.
Wheres the stats on Firefox, Outlook, IE7.
Also are they lumping all traffic that comes from google into one bit because I get all my feeds on my google personal home page.
Darren - Firefox, Outlook, IE7 will be in a future report as noted in the source report. This one just summarizes some data for web based aggregators.
Not a criticism because it really is just semantics but I think it is pretty funny to say that Google has “come out of nowhere” on anything. To me it is the failures that come out of nowhere. Not because everything they do is always great but because they have such staggering penetration via search and an almost bigger one via mindshare. I have been polling average users about they way they use labels in gmail and a clear (if unscientific) majority have no idea what I’m talking about. Often they start complaining about the lack of folders and other gmail specific things that really define it for techie users.
I’m waiting for the day 5 or 6 years from now when they have 95% of all internet searches and companies accuse them of leveraging their monopoly everytime they introduce something new to the homepage.
Very interesting! I as well am surprised at how much Google Reader has exploded. I personally don’t like it much at all, but that’s just because it works so much differently than NetVibes and I am used to NetVibes and love how it works. Speaking of NetVibes, wow, I thought it was a lot more popular than that. But it’s only 3% of views? Surprising!
Although now that I tihnk about it, that’s probably because you can see all the headlines in netvibes just fine without having to click any of them, and then you just click the ones you want. As opposed to Google Reader, whose default behaviour basically forces you to read every article since you scroll through them one at a time. Not that that’s bad, necessarily, but not the way I like to read news.
Some great information here–the information about Google Reader/PH is also pretty cool.
Has anyone answered Darren’s question. It would appear that this could be entirely from the Google start page and not at all google reader traction.
Where is my.yahoo.com on here? I personally know more people using that than Google Reader
How come MyYahoo doesn’t appear on the chart for views? It doesn’t count viewing a headline as viewing a feed? Doesn’t that sort of hint that these stats are kind of flawed…? It appears that there are a lot of people out there using MyYahoo as a feedreader… but they’re apparently not being counted as viewing feeds when they scan headlines…
I don’t know about everyone else, but switching to Google Reader from Bloglines last year drastically changed my feed reading habits. I had been organizing and reading by folder in Bloglines, but now, with Reader’s “river of news” default behavior, I get whatever is new, regardless of how I organized it. That, combined with the keyboard shortcuts that just seem so much faster than Bloglines’, means I can get through a ton of information in a really short time.
I think that user benefit is indirectly inflating these “engagement numbers for Google Reader. When I look at my trend data in Reader for the last 30 days, I have one feed out of 40 that *isn’t* labeled as 100% read. That single feed is marked as 99%.
I can guarantee you that I didn’t read anywhere close to 100% of the items represented on that trend list. Sure, I may have scanned them and automatically marked them as “read” with my “j” key, but I wouldn’t call that engagement.
Yahoo is included on the Feedburner click report but not view report shown above. See http://blogs.feedburner.com/fe.....m.php#more
I’m not sure the Google Reader numbers are really that accurate in terms of intentional adoption of RSS. When I had Google Reader as a part of the desktop product, I found that it started pulling feeds without my having added them, simply because it recognized that I was interested in something related.
I know that I don’t have 317 readers to my Kansas Jayhawks blog, but Feedburner says that I do. A majority of those readers are from Google. I’m glad that Google is helping expose people to my blog, but I really don’t think that hundreds of people have actively subscribed to the feed so much as Google has subscribed for them because it knows they’re searching for Jayhawk related news and information and the Phog Blog has what they’re looking for.
Maybe I’m wrong on this though.
@Narendra: The reported number of subscribers from Google includes both Reader and Personalized Homepage; the views data is exclusively from Google Reader, as PH does not render HTML from the body of the feed item. Views are incremented only when that HTML is rendered, so the only views data we’re capturing is from Google Reader.
@Brent and Josh: Since My Yahoo! does not render HTML from the feed items, there’s no way for us to independently capture how many items were “viewed” by readers. As noted in the report, a view would indicate that someone read the feed content; with My Yahoo!, the user experience is to click on a headline and return to the site where the content originated.
@Jason: Marking a feed as read in Google Reader is not the same as us capturing a view. In the former case, you’re indicating to Google Reader that the item is no longer “new”; in the latter, you’re actually viewing the feed item content in your browser window, resulting in the rendering of HTML in that feed item, which results in an item view captured by us.
Let me know if this helps clarify the information.
–Rick
@Jeremy: The desktop product is entirely independent of the data we reported on today. Google Desktop is not included in the data reported by Google, nor are the views/clicks data we included today affected by Google Desktop. You’re right that GD will auto-discover feeds on sites that you frequent in your browser, and those subscribers may or may not actually interact with your content. It’s that reason we felt it important to go beyond subscriber number when analyzing the growing importance of feeds - by looking at actual feed item views and feed clicks, we’re able to better gauge how engaged the subscribers actually are.
Hope that helps.
Right now Bloglines is saying
Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access / on this server.
Apache/2.2.2 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.2 OpenSSL/0.9.7a Server at http://www.bloglines.com Port 80
Maybe they’ve decided to give up and go home.
I blogged about why I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader recently at http://shannonclark.wordpress......bloglines/
In short - while I have been a longtime Bloglines user (from nearly when they launched), I’ve never gotten some features of Bloglines to work correctly and over time it was slowing down on me (because of saved feed elements still marked as unread etc).
Google Reader, in contrast, is very fast, has many useful modes, and I love the ajax driven endless scroll capabilities (great for catching on large feeds such as TechCrunch or BoingBoing). I’m just getting started exploring the keyboard shortcuts and I appreciate how they have added features over time.
I’m ashamed to admit that I just recently started using Google Reader as an RSS reader, especially considering how web-centric I’ve become over the last two years. I use Google for practically everything — e-mail, search, some docs and spreadsheets, etc.
Better late than never, eh? Hopefully Google’s response to providing actual subscriber numbers will lead to a broader adoption of the same.
———————————
http://www.MillionReturn.Com — Return $1m from 1 page! How?
I think one thing that seems to be missing here is that “Google” also aggregates feeds for its start pages. While our user group may use the reader more, I can promise the wider audience uses the start page more.
Ronald, I’m not sure you should be ashamed. I wonder if “Google coming from nowhere” was simply a result of perfect (or lucky) timing. Here’s a theory: RSS (anecdotally) made the leap from early adopters to the wider masses late last year… at the same time as Google started to promote an easy-to-use feedreader. Newbies to RSS turned to their trusted Google to search for a reader, and bam! The charts above don’t lie. I wonder what the stats are for customer-churn on bloglines etc in the last 6 months. My guess is that it would be low. Perhaps the pie of RSS-reading users has grown, and Google was in the right place at the right time to swallow up all the newbies (including you)? The fact that “Bloggers everywhere saw their subscriber numbers jump an average of 53%r” seems to back up that theory? Eitherway – great news for Feedburner!
ahem… almost 285 000
I don’t think anyone should be surprised that the numbers look the way they do in regards to Google. It should have the lion’s share of the market, because theirs is simply a better product.
All this love of Google Reader made my hiccup today. I’m seeing stuff that I marked as read hours ago. What gives? Oh yeah it is in beta.
I guess I’m not surprised that Google have come out on top. What I am surprised about is how quickly they have done it. And how little they emphasize Google Reader in relation to their other products. Perhaps now we’ll hear some crowing from Google about how Reader is the King of the Hill.
The Feedburner numbers are way, way overblown. Here’s the explainer.
Steven J. Levitt and Sephen D. Dubner over at their Freakonomics blog (they also wrote the book by the same title) saw a sudden jump in the number of people subscribing to their feed lon Saturday. They had this to say:
“Our hosting service says about 50,000 unique visitors come each day. That’s a lot of people — but when our traffic is analyzed by other companies, the number is considerably less.
The other day, I noticed something strange. The little box in the right-hand margin of this page that lists the number of RSS subscribers, via our FeedBurner feed, had jumped from about 14,000 to 42,000. Surely, I thought, this was an error.
But it wasn’t. According to the FeedBurner blog, the FeedBurner numbers as of last Saturday now include people who subscribe to blogs through Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage. It may be that some of our subscribers actually subscribe to blog “packages,” and not the Freakonomics blog in particular. Even so, we suddenly have three times more feed traffic than we thought.
So: thanks to FeedBurner, Google, and of course you 28,000 previously uncounted readers. This is the most exciting data revision since the I.R.S.’s discovery that seven million declared dependents were in fact phantom deductions.”
Hmmm…
Sorry, data overload: It’s Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
I been using feedburner for a while now… felt that it works better with yahoo reader
Nice. My thoughts echo those of Jason Berberich (comment 16) exactly. I used to use Bloglines a long time ago, but switched over to Google Reader during their first release. I’m amazed at how quickly I can run through items through the combination of “river of news” style reading, and using the J and K shortcut keys. I easily run through about 100-120 news items everyday using GReader. No other product compares, in my opinion, especially when you factor in the convenience of access from anywhere.
My stats from GReader:
“From your 137 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 4,138 items, starred 83 items, and shared 0 items.”
Love it.
Google Reader is probably the best RSS reader..You guys might be interested in …
Google Reader is probably the best RSS reader..You guys might be interested in review of desktop/offline [free] RSS reader. newZie is probably the best..!!
Read the review here: http://www.pluggd.in/2007/02/d.....h-one.html
One simple question — Are we days or weeks away from Google announcing they’re acquiring Feedburner?
I also like the fact that Google is always adding new features from time to time. That explains why its leading the pack.
Been using feedburner for a long time now for 2 sites. I see most popular portals use their service also. but they have some problems with slowness with some of their features,which needs to be improved as they reach higher milestones in terms of usage.
i just use digg or reddit as a meta-feedreader. if something interesting emerges somewhere, its bound to show up there. seems a lot easier than managing 500 subscriptions and hovering over them like and idiot.
It’s got to be that Google allows users to put its Reader widget on Google start pages. When you consider the use of Google Reader - and track the adoption parallel to the timeline of the launch of personalized Google Start pages, I don’t think there’s any surprise at all.
The question is, do users of Google Reader really believe they’re using an RSS reader, or do they just think of the widget on their Start pages as a news headline reader? I’d be interested to see what share of Google Reader users also use other RSS readers.
Regarding NewsGator, this does NOT count any of the client applications (FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, Inbox, etc) - the statement in this post to that effect is inforrect. I wrote much more detail on my blog at http://www.rassoc.com/gregr/we.....x?post=828.
I’ve tried ‘em all: Bloglines, MyYahoo, Google Reader, Omea, FeedDemon/NewsGator, Awasu, NewzCrawler, NetVibes, Thunderbird, Opera, FF Livemarks, blah, blah, blah.
The best for online-only reading is Google Readers (although I still maintain a few Bloglines accounts). Matter of fact, my public Bloglines feed is linked with my name in this post. But the Google Reader is a lot better — and it works well with their customized home page.
However, the best solution overall is Omea, especially now that their Pro edition is FREE. Much better than any other solution, no question about it. Yes, it has negligible market share, but this shouldn’t really matter: Is it a good product? This is the question that matter.
I’d challenge EVERYONE to try Omea from JetBrains and then compare it to Google Reader. You’ll have the river of news feature, clipping features, the ability to capture web pages, note taking and annotations, all sorts of features you do NOT get (yet) with Google Reader. Not great for sharing, but the other advantages far outweigh their disadvantages (at least for me). Social bookmarking is fine, but I’d rather have the ability to annotate posts — and I can still share them by e-mail.
Bottom line: When you look at all the advantages of Omea Pro, you won’t want to use any other reader. A bold statement — and I’m willing to stick by it. (Of course, it’s a temporal statement, not taking into account further developments by other readers or yet-to-be-released news readers.)
GO, OMEA, GO!! (See JetBrains for a free download.)
Last comment: No affiliation at all with JetBrains. I don’t know anybody there, I don’t even know where they’re located. But it’s a great product and I’m a delighted user who has tried just about every major alternative that there is.
One of the understanding is that Yahoo My Page is the simple way to add RSS, beacuse it’s even behyond IE and Firefox.
The question is: will Vista catch all RSS traffic? Or RSS will remain web based?