Hitwise Intelligence - LeeAnn Prescott - US
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January 18, 2007
Web Based Feed Readers - How do they stack up?
Bloggers who use FeedBurner have a general idea of the most popular feed readers based on their subscriber statistics. FeedBurner subscriber statistics on the Hitwise Blog show that Bloglines is by far the most popular feed reader, and Hitwise data also support this. The market share of US visits to Bloglines was 3 times greater than Rojo, its nearest competitive web-based feed reader. The chart below shows the traffic trend over the past year for the leading web-based feed readers. You can see that Google Reader has grown lately, but as of the week ending 1/13/07, it had only 1/13 of the market share of visits of Bloglines.
While comparing web-based feed readers is not a perfect measure of the true size of the feed-reading market, as it does not take into consideration client-based (i.e., NetNewsWire) or portal-based (i.e., My Yahoo!) feed readers, it can give us an indication of the popularity of blog consumption via feeds. Last week I posted a list of the most popular blogs by market share of US visits. Below I added PerezHilton, Huffington Post, and Engadget, three of the most popular blogs in their respective verticals, to the above chart of web-based feed readers.
All three of these blogs have been receiving more traffic than Bloglines for the past year. Perez Hilton is actually one of the leading sites on the Internet, with a US rank of #463 for the week ending 1/13/07. Bloglines ranked at #4,676 in the same period. This analysis leads me to two conclusions: 1) RSS usage, while growing, is still a niche activity and mainstream adoption is still a ways off, and 2) the most successful blogs are being consumed in the standard Web 1.0 fashion - by visiting the websites. These blogs have become destination sites for their readers and have an active community of commenters, which encourages website visits. It seems that the bigger disruption from the growth of blogging is not how we consume the news, but where we get it from.
Posted by LeeAnn Prescott at 01:49 PM
Posted to Blogs and Personal Websites
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Comments
Very interesting. So Rojo use jumped like right when it was acquired by MT and development came to a close? Strange. No MyYahoo on this chart, why not? If Netvibes counts, shouldn't MyYahoo? Surely it's numbers are off the chart.
How about iTunes? Podcast subscription is feed reading, that's got to out rank some of these feed readers.
All these people using web based feed readers should really try out some desktop software! NetNewsWire is much more powerful than any of the above.
None the less, fascinating - I've heard some geeks lately say they think Google Reader is taking over the world. Meanwhile, Bloglines not only has wide adoption -it's also a big innovator, from media handling to data security standards. Though far from perfect, Bloglines does deserve some more respect.
Sorry to ramble in comments, but I love RSS. Thanks for the very interesting post. Nice to see your pic on the blog too, helps personalize the discussion.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick at January 19, 2007 03:30 AM
Each quarter we take a look at these same numbers. http://www.pheedo.info/archives/cat_pheed_read_rss_research.html. Our research is derived from the feeds we manage (analytics/consumer behavior). What we are seeing is popularity in feed readers differs by vertical. For example, overall feed reader usage mirrors what you show however, if you look at our most recent report for the Automotive vertical the results are much different. It shows Bloglines in the #4 position http://www.pheedo.info/archives/000397.html.
Best,
Bill Flitter
Founder
Pheedo, Inc.
Posted by: Bill Flitter at January 19, 2007 11:48 AM
