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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America
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Google Reader Slowly Closing on Bloglines
May 21, 2008
I use Bloglines as my RSS feed reader and it seems I am not alone. It is the most popular web-based feed reader based on share of US visits. However, Google Reader is growing in popularity and closing the gap to Bloglines. Perhaps even more interesting, both websites are growing rapidly in share of US Internet visits and send their visits to quite different websites.
A year ago, Bloglines attracted twice the share of US Internet visits compared with Google Reader. The gap has closed to 40% in the week to 17th May 2008. Last week, Bloglines ranked 21st among Blogs and Personal Websites and Google Reader ranked 32nd. A year ago, those site ranked 45th ad 118th. Share of US Internet visits to Bloglines have increased 158% in the past year and visits to Google Reader are up 267%.
I looked at data for other RSS readers and these two are the biggest based on share of US visits. The next biggest was Rojo, but Bloglines received a 15x larger share of visits than Rojo last week. (I didn't include customizable homepages such as My Yahoo, iGoogle, Google's personalized homepage or My Live in this analysis as they are much more than feed readers).
I looked at the websites and categories of websites visited after Google Reader and Bloglines and was interested to see some clear differences, as illustrated below. These differences point to differing interests of the users. Keep in mind that much of the clickstream behavior is determined by the feeds to which users subscribe.
Let me highlight a few key differences in downstream visits:
- The top downstream category for both feed readers was News and Media. However, Google Reader sent 61% more visits to News and Media websites than Bloglines.
- Bloglines sent almost as much traffic to Blogs and Personal Websites as to News and Media (9.98% and 9.95% respectively). By contrast, Google Reader sent more than twice as much traffic to News and Media websites. This indicates that Google Reader users are more inclined toward mainstream media - using the reader as a front page of a newspaper - while Bloglines seems to be used more for following blogs.
- Bloglines users are also more inclined toward Photography websites, while Google Reader users are more inclined to visit Television websites.
- And the last difference I'll highlight is that Bloglines users are 24% more likely to continue on to a retail (Shopping & Classifieds) website.
While adoption of these readers is low it is growing. The data indicates that users of these readers are increasingly bypassing the content websites. This represents a huge potential disruption for media companies.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 07:28 AM
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Comments
You're not alone, there are Blogliners everywhere. :-)
Eric Engleman
Team Bloglines
Posted by Eric Engleman | May 21, 2008 12:02 PM
I hope you didn't track the stats for reader.google.com, since Google Reader's URL is http://www.google.com/reader .
Posted by Ionut | May 21, 2008 02:15 PM
I have been a fiercely loyal Bloglines customer for years and have recommended it to all RSS newbies I know, but I'm officially done with them.
A simple support request to fix a feed that they've for some reason stopped crawling has gone three weeks without a response. And, since they don't have any way to comment on their "blog", I'm S.O.L.
I didn't want to leave Bloglines, but they've thrown me out the door.
Posted by Mark | May 21, 2008 02:32 PM
I don't think the variations are due to differing interests of the users. I think it's much more likely to be because of different features and the suggested feeds that are provided for users to subscribe to.
Bloglines has a Flickr feed module in Bloglines Beta that shows images in flickr feeds on the start page. And there's also the Bloglines image wall in the available from classic interface that shows a continually changing wall of images from feeds.
I wonder why Google Reader has more people going to tv sites. It could be that they're getting more TV feeds added through their discover feeds feature.
Posted by Flenser | May 21, 2008 04:44 PM
Heather,
Great research. Data like this helps support the growing trend toward content consumption outside of the website. From our vantage point, we see RSS page views outstrip website page views in many cases by 50% plus for many of the top online publishers.
Publishers are turning this traffic into a new source of revenue. We just did a case study on Gawker Media's success with RSS advertising. http://www.pheedo.info/archives/000417.html
Best,
Bill Flitter
CEO | Founder
Pheedo, Inc
Posted by Bill Flitter | May 21, 2008 05:23 PM
Small question regarding your data - does this include the Bloglines Beta? From the diagram is seems you're comparing reader.google.com and www.bloglines.com. Many bloglines users, myself included, have shifted to using beta.bloglines.com. Is it taken into account?
Posted by Zviki | May 22, 2008 03:55 AM
Thanks for all the thoughtful comments. To respond to a few items...
Martin - Time Spent: Last week, the average session duration for Bloglines (based on US visits) was 13 minutes 17 seconds. For Google Reader it was 9 minutes 21 seconds. Bloglines' session duration has remained pretty flat (it was 12:12 in the same week last year) while Google Reader's session duration has increased from 4:06). Great question - definitely one to think about futher.
URL - Ionut: Yes, we are reporting the right URL. It looks different in the chart as we have it listed in our database that way but we are tracking it correctly.
Zviki - Bloglines Beta: I am checking this with our tech team and will get back to you.
Mark - I've forwarded your note to someone at Bloglines. Hope you can get this sorted!
Thanks again, Heather
Posted by Heather Hopkins | May 22, 2008 06:39 AM
Bloglines is owned by Ask.Com, enough said. They are the same guys that had to buy dictionary.com and STILL spelled Cinco de Mayo wrong on their OWN HOME PAGE. eesh.
I think Bloglines would be embarrassed to be openly affiliated with Ask.com. And Google reader is better in any case with their search. And Google reader didn't magically lose months of user's data and index like Bloglines did (several times).
Posted by Joe Friscan | May 22, 2008 08:25 AM
A couple members of my marketing course have also reported to me similar stories as Mark in that they have been having trouble getting certain blogs crawled and fed to them.
I set up a comparison of my own between Google Reader and Bloglines and found that Google Reader often would show me new posts before Bloglines ... sometimes up to a 6 hour difference depending on the blog.
Todd Alan
Long Tail Treasure
Posted by todd alan | May 23, 2008 01:12 AM
Rachael, Thanks for your comment. Yes, I should have mentioned Netvibes. Bloglines received 7x more traffic than Netvibes last week and Google Reader received 5.5x more traffic.
Posted by Heather Hopkins | May 23, 2008 08:17 AM
Time is not too far when Google reader will surpass Bloglines...
Posted by Manoj | May 26, 2008 03:22 AM
Give google reader a serios trial period. You won't go back to bloglines.
Especially if you use gmail.
I was a hardcore bloglines fan but made myself use GR for a week to truly get to grips with it. I then went back to Bloglines and it was live giving up the excellent GMail system for the old, classic Hotmail interface.
Bloglines will be dead within a year or so - if you truly give GR a proper trial you'll see why.
Posted by Daniel | June 8, 2008 03:24 PM
Bloggin is ok, however if you want to really get the power of the net online TV viewing is the thing.
............................
Mani Kanna
There are a lot of sites out there showing book video. BookVideoTV, BookTelevision and of course CSPAN, but I like how BN.com and Reader's Entertainment TV have specific genre channels and original shows. There's just more to see and I can be specific in what genre I'm interested in. Anyone else watch online tv?
">http://www.readersentertainment.tv
Posted by mani Kanna | June 18, 2008 04:39 AM
Interesting article. One thing that could be helpful to those of us who are not intimately familiar with the RSS feed market is if someone could explain how the data reported by Feedburner may compare with what HitWise measures.
I have a camera blog and Feedburner consistently shows "Google Feedfetcher" to have 4x-5X times the readers as Bloglines, and Bloglines has about the same number of subscribers as Firefox Live Bookmarks and NewsGator Online.
Posted by 1001noisycameras | August 10, 2008 08:12 PM
Scoble actually predicted a Google Reader social bookmarking engine in 2006.
You can now add friends to your friends list, share feed items, bookmark single blog posts from blogs that you read on the web and here’s the kicker, there is now a blog recommendation engine that recommends blogs you do not read by what your friends list is subscribed to in their Google Readers.
Then, everything you share and bookmark in Google Reader of course comes up on your Google shared items page linked to by your Google profile.
What really blew me away was the recommendation engine. If you add as many of your email list subscribers as you can to your Google Reader you can get a real good idea of what other blogs your subscribers are reading.
The links in your shared items are all HTML and fully followed so every time one of your RSS subscribers shares a blog post it is creating incoming links to your site.
Better yet, it uses the exact blog post title you wrote so now your links use your keyword phrases and bookmarkers can’t change your title tag.
After talking to my SEO top dog contacts, they were all floored and assured me this is the new SEO tactic that no one knows about.
http://www.keywebdata.com/?p=136
It is kind of hard to add friends, the easiest way is to send a chat invite from Gmail and then email your contact you want to friend and have them email you back. It seems Google wants a two way conversation before they will allow you to become mutual friends.
If you would like to friend me, add chrislang at gmail.com to your Google Gmail chat and send me an email letting me know so I can return an email to you, thereby creating a two way connection in Google.
Google is quietly rolling this out behind the scenes but it is a full blown social bookmarking application and the blog recommendation engine is the new blog marketing strategy.
One thing I have not quite figured out is if using FeedBurner now hurts you since the links point at the FeedBurner redirect rather than your site like a WordPress feed does.
Posted by Chris Lang | August 22, 2008 02:20 PM
Heather,
thanks a bunch for this great analysis. It highlights well some differences between the two giants in the web-based feedreader playing-field. It would be great to hear a bit more about the actual attention these sites receive and in particular, the dynamic nature of attention.
Just to highlight what I mean: Readers are becoming more and more popular and (I think) receive a great deal of attention since more news is actually consumed in a reader. Not only news, but in particular web-content is increasingly consumed in readers. so how much time do people spend reading content. Is there a visible trends that people consume more information via readers than say a year ago?
Posted by Martin | May 21, 2008 10:39 AM