My Yahoo 6th Most Popular RSS Reader
Feedburner’s CTO, Eric Lunt, pulls some stats and shows that Bloglines is the number one RSS reader in terms of subscribers to feeds, while My Yahoo is in sixth place, very strong in a crowded market. This at Datamation, which lists the top 10 as such:
- Bloglines 19.49%
- NetNewsWire 10.07%
- iTunes 9.53%
- Firefox Live Bookmarks 7.25%
- iPodder 7.17%
- My Yahoo 6.68%
- FeedDemon 4.23%
- NewsGator Online 3.83%
- Reader not identified 3.07%
- Pluck 2.07%
Surprisingly, Outlook-based Newsgator is 16th with 1.27% of the market. I thought it was more popular. Of course, combining Newsgator, Online and Outlook, with their recently purchased FeedDemon, gives Newsgator 9.33% of the market, a nice fourth place, third among “real” aggregators (iTunes is not an aggregator, but a podcatcher). Also, I find it interesting that iTunes has such a large percentage, considering these numbers were recorded on June 29, one freakin’ day after iTunes added podcast support, a level of growth that is spectacular.
(via Dan Gillmor)
UPDATE: Yahoo Senior Director (and My Yahoo head) Scott Gatz rightly pointed out in an email that I pretty much ignored Feedburner’s original set of data, which showed My Yahoo at number one with 59.02% of the market, followed by Bloglines with 10.42%. I firmly believe those numbers are completely absurd, and represent a view skewed by default feeds and abandoned pages.
When Feedburner removed the data from the most popular feeds, all of which are served as a default to new users of My Yahoo, we wind up with the results I printed above. If My Yahoo indeed had even double the market share of Bloglines, removing the default feeds would still leave it in first place. While the results may be technically accurate, they are too questionable to cite. I believe a study that uses all but the most popular feeds is an accurate one, and put enough weight behind the second set of results. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.
I wish the top aggregators would just tell us how many users they have, and publish how many subscribers each feed has. Additionally, it would be nice if we received some sort of stats on how many stick with the default feeds, so we can discount their numbers at least somewhat, and how many customize their pages, so we can count those completely. That sort of disclosure may be very unlikely, but it certainly would be nice.
UPDATE 2: My Yahoo does report stats in server referral logs. The stats for InsideGoogle, for aggregators that report:
- Bloglines 452 subscribers
- NewsGator Online (all feeds) 97 subscribers
- My Yahoo: users 69; views 10312
- Feedster (all feeds) 4 subscribers
- Hatena RSS 4 subscribers
- R|Mail 1 subscribers
- NewsGatorEnterprise 1 subscribers
- LiveJournal 1 reader
- newsisfree.com 0 subscribers
Are there any other aggregators that report subscribers I should be looking for? Either way, it would be really cool if anyone who can posts their stats below, so we can compare.
Listado de los agregadores RSS más usados
Eric Lunt, de Feedsburner ha presentado datos estadísticos del uso de lectores o agregadores RSS y cúal ha sido la sorpresa que al contrario de lo que muchos pensábamos, el servicio Bloglines no gana por mayoría. Así, los resultados son muy ajusta…
Trackback by genbeta | July 6, 2005
iTunes numbers are suspicious. It’d be interesting to see the question asked - I’d bet more than a few of these folk are a bit confused as to what an RSS feed is, and simply selected a piece of software they know.
Comment by Michael Jones | July 6, 2005
Micheal, this is not a user survey. This is data from Feedburner’s actual usage logs. You can’t confuse that.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | July 6, 2005
if it’s a day after, than that’s why the’re so high!
everybody tried it out and maybe walked away after that
Comment by gumuz | July 6, 2005
Number of RSS Readers
A piece of information that I’ve been analyzing, in my spare time, is the number of readers on this web log. How this is done can be very tricky, as there are a number of factors (people can click your RSS feed and ‘view’ it in their browser, but it…
Trackback by John Resig | July 8, 2005