Great news! Prompted by my December post about RSS Reader Market Share, Feedburner (the company I selected as the most promising Web 2.0 company of 2004/5) has just released their own RSS Aggregator stats. This is exactly what I asked for, because statistically the Feedburner data is much much bigger - and hence more statistically significant - than my own data. Also I assume Feedburner's data includes Boing Boing's. Feedburner are using their "most highly subscribed 800 feeds" and not only is Boing Boing almost certainly Feedburner's biggest client, it's also arguably the world's most popular blog.
I'll be chewing over this data over the next few days and I'll post my detailed analysis later. One quick observation for now: Feedburner's top 3 is the same as my top 3. Bloglines, followed by NetNewsWire, followed by Firefox Live Bookmarks. However the gap that Bloglines has is nowhere near as large as it was in my stats and NetNewsWire is a very healthy second (still only just over half of Blogline's share however!). This augers well for competition in the RSS Aggregator space, because it's always a worry when one company monopolises the competition. And because NetNewsWire is not a browser-based RSS reader, does this also auger well for desktop clients (i.e. non-Web 2.0), I wonder? And the Apple Mac for that matter... Or is it a reflection of the popularity of Apple Macs and desktop apps among techies, who are still the predominate users of RSS at this stage of the game?
So here are the official Feedburner stats (thanks Dick and the good folk of Feedburner for posting this!):
Top 20 RSS clients across FeedBurner most highly subscribed 800 feeds as of January 6, 2005
Aggregator Name (Market Share Percentage)
1. Bloglines (32.86%)
2. NetNewsWire (16.95%)
3. Firefox Live Bookmarks (7.78%)
4. Pluck (7.20%)
5. NewsGator Online(4.45%)
6. (not identified) (4.07%)*
7. FeedDemon (3.83%)
8. SharpReader (3.27%)
9. My Yahoo (2.58%)
10. iPodder (2.42%)
11. NewsGator (2.23%)
12. Thunderbird (2.13%)
13. RSS Bandit (1.12%)
14. NewsFire (1.05%)
15. iPodderX (1.02%)
16. Sage (0.71%)
17. FeedReader (0.67%)
18. RssReader (0.54%)
19. LiveJournal (0.46%)
20. Opera RSS Reader (0.45%)
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Comments
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Dick from Feedburner makes a point that the list is skewed by clients that include a default feed list. NetNewsWire has many starter feeds that users may not unsubscribe from, and this will increase its share.
Bloglines doesn't include any feeds by defaults -- users have to add each one or import them from an OPML file.
So I agree with Dick -- the Feedburner stats overstate the share of clients like NetNewsWire. It would be great if they could post the list without the top 10 default feeds.
Posted by: Kirk Scott | January 11, 2005 4:52 PM
I'm not sure that the "default feeds" issue is that important. And if Feedburner does remove the "top 10 feeds" (note they did not say top 10 *default* feeds), then that will presumably mean no Boing Boing - and their data is probably more valuable than any others.
Having said that, I too would like to see the results if they removed the top 10 feeds - more out of curiousity than any concern over skewed data.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | January 12, 2005 7:43 AM
Some corrections and notes about NetNewsWire:
1. Users may unsubscribe from any of the default feeds in NetNewsWire. Of course! It would be very weird if that wasn't allowed.
2. There are 18 default feeds in the current 2.0 beta. Of those 18 feeds, two of them are FeedBurner feeds. (For MacMerc and MacMegasite.)
3. In the current release version, NetNewsWire 1.0.8, there are 15 default feeds. Of those 15, there are just two FeedBurner feeds -- MacMerc and MacMegasite, same as in 2.0 beta.
I agree, though, that it would be interesting to see the FeedBurner stats minus their top ten feeds.
Posted by: Brent Simmons | January 12, 2005 3:01 PM