Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a million daily RSS readers, now is a good time for a new update.
In June 2006 Firefox, Bloglines and Newsgator were the three largest readers, in that order. Feedburner did an analysis later in 2006 with similar results. Long ago Google reader eclipsed all of those readers. And recently, Outlook has surged as the feed reader of choice.
Of our roughly 1.4 million RSS readers, 520,000, or about 38%, come from Outlook. 390,000, or about 28%, come from Google Reader. Newsgator and BlogRovR are next with about 10% each, followed by Netvibes, Bloglines, AOL, Flock, Yahoo and the Windows Media Center.
The complete breakdown is below.
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I’m an Outlook reader myself. Works great, but it has somewhat of a lag.
I prefer to visit the website, I don’t use RSS.
By the way, I enjoy your new search features, very convenient.
I can’t believe that many people use Outlook as their RSS reader!
that is what i’m screaming… outlook? wassat?
That is exactly what I thought. I see Outlook and AOL readers as Special Olympics techies.
Really? Maybe you’ve never had a real job that requires Exchange server, but Outlook is great for that. Maybe you should get off your high horse?
Blake -> Exactly what I thought when I saw this post’s title (Google Reader). But eh, whatever suits them..
I’m a flock user. I’m also using ‘Newsstand’ on my iPhone. I have about 100 rss feeds I read for work, research and to stay on top of things ..
It’s interesting to see how Microsoft overtook all the other feedreaders just by introducing this long-awaited feature and their massive userbase.
Yeah the Outlook number is surprising and amazing, esp. given the tilt of the TC base.
I wonder how Windows Media Center 2005 outnumbers Firefox and IE7+ built-in RSS readers? Seems like there has to be a glitch in the statistics.
Let’s see if we can get feedly on this list next year!
Your Outlook results are a lot higher than I would have expected. Quite surprising, and I’d have to guess that’s good news for the TC team, assuming those are almost exclusively business readers and not consumers. Thanks for sharing the details.
I detect some “effect of being included as a default feed”-ity in there. BlogRovR is particularly intriguing. I’d never heard of it before, and of the over 20,000 people I have subscribed to my various feeds, FeedBurner shows not a single one from that (it’s not even listed). In comparison, 0.25% of my subscribers are from Outlook
Of course, having your feed included by default in systems is pretty awesome and definitely a recognition of the success of the site, so kudos on that at least.
I really want to know what the Media Center business is, I have a high proportion of those on my blog too
I’d be curious to now what the breakdown is among mobile readers.
sorry…that should be “curious to know”
wow i didnt even know outlook had an rss reader, lol. and ive been a user of it forever, thought i was the only one i know not on gmail. good to know im not alone.
Mike,
Where are FeedDemon and NetNewsWire in your stats?
Wow. I used to use Outlook but it was too dang slow and I got promoted so I don’t have to worry about the Proxy Admin. It must really rile the militant Apple iBoi’s that prowl this site seeing Outlook up there.
I use Apple Mail’s integrated RSS reader, and it is fantastic: simple and beautiful, it lets you treat RSS posts just like emails. I do not know much about other readers, so I cannot compare, but if you use Mac OS X and Apple Mail, do yourself a favor and check it out. It makes it easy even for novices (even though RSS is a simple concept, many average users fail to get it right away).
Those who say that they are checking out the web sites directly should consider using RSS, as checking the web sites over and over is a complete waste of time.
Hey Michael,
this data is very misleading and Outlook 2007 is not your most populare Feed Reader. Here is my explanation:
http://marcelo.sampa.com/marce.....opular.htm
-Marcelo
Not to rain on the parade but I believe Feedburner has a bug with counting Outlook 2007 readers.
Two posts about this found in a quick Google:
http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=7457
http://www.jimkarter.com/2008-.....count.html
You may be 590k readers high
From the feedburner forum post:
For TechCrunch, @techcrunch is my feed reader of sorts.
I’ve tried to get people to understand feeds online and the RSS pages do not make it easy to non-technical people. They need to clean that up and then much more will understand. People don’t follow how to get to them, how they’re organized etc. They “get” an email coming into their inbox that doesn’t require them to remember how to find them etc.
I know most of this audience prob gasps in horror but there are a lot more ’still getting to know the internet’ folks out there than not.
What about the stats for those of us that get the TechCrunch RSS feed on our iGoogle page?
http://www.google.com/support/.....opic=12019
There is no way that is right - Outlook? Is it April 1st already?
I believe this without a doubt. Management of that syndicated content is WAY more powerful through Outlook - syncing with other office apps like OneNote, and linking to tasks, calendar, etc.
One BIG omission with Outlook - the only thing that makes one part of the experience worse than any other feed reader - if you are reading this, fix it now Microsoft (or please god someone tell me how to disable this) - because of the security restrictions you can’t, absolutely cannot, read the full HTML article within Outlook. You have to view the article in a web browser. No trusted content, nothin’,
I can trust and read an HTML email that could potentially contain worse than anything I would subscribe to manually. Seriously. I hate this, but I still use Outlook. Make it better.
I still prefer reading the site as it is. I do agree with the somewhat bloated Outlook numbers, Outlook is everywhere. No surprises for me!
Oh btw
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New Jobs. CauseForce. Strands. Carbine Studios. NCsoft.
Good to see Netvibes still top of the feedreading homepages! Equally very surprised to see AOL so high. Do a lot of people still use the Aol software to access the web in the states??
reflecting the changing viewership of TC?
I have had this same problem few months back.
28 %, it’s a very good score for google reader
I saw the Feedburner counter and the word “breakdown” and was excited about finally reading something about Feedburner’s issues. But, alas, I will have to wait for my in-depth coverage of Feedburner’s quality of service. Sigh. Interesting article anyway. I have work-related feeds in Outlook and personal feeds in Google, for what it’s worth.
Netvibes user myself though, a feeds few arrive through Google, Bloglines, BlogRovr
Outlooks rise in use maybe due to the new influx of Vista users not venturing outside the MS Universe?
Just a thought.
I use Greader
Another option is intraVnews for those who want to try RSS in older versions of Outlook (XP & 2003).
intraVnews can also pull the HTML into Outlook, configurable per feed.