Kevin Donahue posts some RSS Aggregator stats for his FanBlogs network of sites - and I was taken aback to see who is number 1, by a long shot. No it's not Bloglines, as it is for most of the geek set. For football fans, a staggering 64.8% of FanBlogs.com readers are subscribed using MyYahoo. Kevin writes:
"Since Fanblogs has over 100 college football feeds, I took the top conference feeds, combined, and got the averages below. This may not be the best method, but I think it's a fair representation."
My Yahoo 64.8%
FeedDemon 16.2%
Bloglines 14.8%
SharpReader 3.1%
Firefox Live Bookmarks 0.8%
and the rest
Kevin goes on to say that "Fanblogs users are (IMHO) Joe American. The audience is tilted towards the non-geek. My Yahoo is winning with that set."
NB: I'm not sure how many subscribers FanBlogs has, but judging by a sample subscription I did of the main feed in Bloglines (49 Bloglines subscribers to that particular feed) it's probably not a small number.
Now Kevin doesn't sound all that surprised, but frankly I'm amazed at how much MyYahoo is ahead by. Here in the geek part of the blogosphere, we all assume that Bloglines rules and is the dominant RSS Aggregator. My stats back in December proved that and Feedburner's own stats (with a very large data set) confirmed it - Bloglines has over 50% of the RSS Aggregator market.
Well not for US football fans, it seems. For them, MyYahoo is like the New England Patriots of RSS Aggregators and Bloglines is more like the Buffalo Bills (no offence to Bills fans). Mind you, it helps that MyYahoo buttons are plastered all over the Fanblogs syndication page ;-)
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all Read/WriteWeb posts
Indeed, Yahoo beats Bloglines on my non-tech site (a political buzz aggregator), though only by 1.43X, not 4.4X.
But I'll add that the average My Yahoo subscriber clicks through considerably less than the average Bloglines subscriber...maybe only 1/3 as much. So perhaps Bloglines subscribers are more active readers.
Posted by: Gabe | March 29, 2005 1:06 AM
Re the MyYahoo stickers @ Fanblogs.com: That's just appealing to your base. I haven't looked for clickthrough rates for the various readers, but that would be interesting.
Re Fanblogs feed traffic: The highest feed has 842 subscribers, the lowest has 1. I'll get some data over to you for the project. Interestingly enough, some school feeds have higher percentages in various readers while some are 90+% to MyYahoo.
Nice to see Gabe confirming the MyYahoo tilt.
Posted by: Kevin Donahue | March 29, 2005 1:33 AM
Richard, its nice to see this info. One thing you should note for the tech audience, both your december stats and feedburner's were based on a My Yahoo bug that made the stats count wrong, see feedburner's followup post here:
http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/000987.html
Posted by: Scott Gatz | March 29, 2005 9:17 AM
Thanks for your informative comments Gabe, Kevin and Scott.
fyi Kevin also posted this clarification about the buttons on his site:
"Regarding the MyYahoo buttons, those were added in March 2005. Since the launch in 2003, we simply had orange "XML" buttons on the feed listing. Once we became aware of the skew towards MyYahoo, we added the sticker. A few weeks ago, we added the NewsGator stickers as well."
Posted by: Richard MacManus | March 29, 2005 9:50 AM
I'm certainly not the average Joe web user and pretty much solely use MyYahoo for RSS aggregation. I primarily used FeedDemon until a couple of months ago. The killer app for me was the Yahoo Ticker that runs in my Taskbar. My RSS headlines stream on the bottom of my screen all day and I click things that catch my eye.
I simply don't have the time to actively browse through all of my incoming feeds, so this use it or lose it technique works nicely for me. The sites I read more often I have tucked away in my FeedDemon to catch up on the weekends, if needed.
I tried Bloglines but found their user interface detestful. I'd rather just use reFeed on my own server.
http://ticker.yahoo.com
Posted by: Brady Joslin | March 29, 2005 11:24 AM
One issue with feedburner is that the site has to be using it. I've noticed that mainly the tech-oriented use feedburner. They are smaller staffed sites and want the analytics for free.
I teach non-tech students. One advantage of my yahoo for rss is that it is brain-dead simple. Bloglines is confusing, even for me, and I'm a sophisticate.
Posted by: Bud Gibson | March 30, 2005 12:52 PM