There's always a lot of talk about market share for web browsers, which is picking up again now that Firefox is starting to eat into Internet Explorer's huge lead. But there's been little talk of who is winning the battle for the eyeballs of RSS consumers. Mainly that's because reading RSS feeds is still a niche activity, but who's to say that 2005 won't be the breakthrough year for RSS Reader software? Or it may well be that RSS feeds will be increasingly read on the Web (e.g. My Yahoo! or Firefox Live Bookmarks) or in the Email Inbox (if Microsoft finally integrates an RSS Reader into Outlook). In any of these cases, it's interesting to start looking at trends for RSS Readers and which of the current crop has the most market share right now.
I'll start the ball rolling and offer up my own RSS Reader stats for your perusal. For the past couple of months I've been using Feedburner to track stats for my RSS feeds. The following graph outlines the RSS Reader spread for people who requested my feeds over a 24-hour period on 17 December 2004.
Table Format:
| RSS Reader | Percentage |
| Bloglines | 51 |
| NetNewsWire | 7 |
| Firefox Live Bookmarks | 6 |
| FeedDemon | 5 |
| NewsGator | 4 |
| SharpReader | 3 |
| RSS Bandit | 3 |
| Radio Userland | 2 |
| My Yahoo! | 2 |
| The Rest | 17 |
The first thing you'll notice is that Bloglines dominates my stats, with over 50% of my readers (apparently) using Bloglines. However there are a couple of important caveats I think need to be placed on that. Bloglines is a web-based RSS Aggregator, which gives it some advantages over the Desktop-based Readers when it comes to stats:
1) Bloglines polls my site more often (on average) than the desktop-based RSS Readers - which most of the others on my list are. So it's likely that the desktop-based Readers are under-represented in my stats. For example, if a NetNewsWire subscriber was offline for a few days during the 17 Dec 2004 period I used, then his/her Reader would not have requested my RSS feed during that time - and hence it would not show up in my stats. I would guess this is a fairly common scenario, as not everybody obsessively fires up their RSS Reader every day (I'm sad to say I'm one of those obsessives!).
2) Related to the first point, it's uncertain how many abandoned accounts Bloglines has that contribute to their readership numbers. With the desktop-based RSS Readers if someone abandons your feed, that will be reflected in the Feedburner stats because the RSS Reader no longer requests the feed. But with Bloglines, it's their server that requests my feeds - not each individual subscriber. So abandoned Bloglines accounts will not be reflected in Feedburner's stats (and there's not much Feedburner can do about that).
So it's clear that Bloglines has an unfair advantage when comparing RSS Reader market share using Feedburner stats. Nevertheless, the gap is so large that it points to Bloglines being the dominant RSS Reader on the Web today. Only probably not by the margin my stats indicate.
Another thing - my total number of subscribers is around 500, which is pretty good numbers for an amateur. But it's probably not good enough to provide a reliable statistical measure for RSS Reader Market Share. It'd be interesting then to find out the same kind of stats from some of the professional or big-name blogs using Feedbuner. Boing Boing would be the most interesting and would provide the best indication of RSS Reader market share. But other professional players like Steve Rubel or 37Signals would also give a decent picture. Do you think we can pursuade them and others to share their stats? I'd love to get a more official view of market share for RSS Readers!
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Total subscribers: ~5000 (nowhere near Steve R. or Scoble)
From memory, roughly 50% used BlogLines as well. NewsGator was second, SharpReader was third.
But I haven't been using Feedburner for a while, so those stats are a few months old.
Posted by: Jeremy C. Wright | December 20, 2004 12:29 PMIs livejournal counted in this? It's syndication functionality is widely used by it's users.
Posted by: Kristian | December 20, 2004 2:53 PMAh, I skipped to the graphs. I didn't realized this had a limited scope.
Posted by: Kristian | December 20, 2004 2:55 PMIn September I wrote an article about RSS for American Demographics magazine. For the article Feedburner provided the list of the top 8 aggregators according to their stats.
The list was this:
1. Bloglines
2. NetNewsWire
3. newsgator
4. Yahoo!
5. SharpRader
6. FeedDemon
7. RssReader
8. FeedReader
I don't have the percentages associated with this, but I could see if I could get some. You can find the whole article here: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4021/is_7_26/ai_n6171189/pg_2.
Hope that helps.
Posted by: Noah Brier | December 20, 2004 3:09 PMIs Bloglines using something like attention.xml to feed its subscriber numbers back to Feedburner? While it would fetch more often than a desktop client, it's also sharing that fetch among a big group of readers, so just counting the number of fetches isn't accurate.
I'd also be curious about the LiveJournal stats. I was using that to read feeds for several months until I got tired of the limited interface. Still, I don't think they provided an easy way for FeedBurner to learn how many people were monitoring a feed through their LJs.
Posted by: Ben Combee | December 20, 2004 6:26 PMI get very similar results. For me, Bloglines is out in front with 52%.
Posted by: Darren | December 20, 2004 6:31 PMIn case you didn't know, you have - as of this moment - 232 subscribers at BlogLines. That matches pretty well with your stats.
Posted by: Mark Wubben | December 20, 2004 10:05 PMBen - Bloglines and other server-based aggregators generally provide the number of users a request represents in the User-Agent header. If they don't, you'll generally see a note to that effect in your FeedBurner stats.
Posted by: Eric Lunt | December 21, 2004 2:42 AMEnough share to IPO in 98.
Kristian: in my experience, LJ is not really a blog and doesn't work well with RSS at all (no feeds for your friends list)
Posted by: matt havener | December 21, 2004 6:25 AMMark, I actually had over 250 Bloglines subscribers as of 17 Dec, as I have 3 separate feeds which Feedburner aggregates but Bloglines doesn't (and I've flagged it as an issue before to Bloglines: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/002482.php).
Posted by: Richard MacManus | December 21, 2004 7:19 AMAnd just for the record, I'm not sure about Jeremy's 5000 subscribers. I was emailing him yesterday about this. According to Bloglines, Jeremy's blog Ensight has 200 Bloglines subscribers. So the numbers simply don't add up to me, unless I'm missing something somewhere? I probably am missing some info from Jeremy, so apologies in advance for questioning the 5000 figure. But I do want to clarify that.
If it's true that Bloglines does have a 40-50% market share, then if we take Dave Winer as an example of an A-Lister - he has approx 4000 Bloglines subscribers, so I'd expect him to have around 10k total subscribers to his RSS feed.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | December 21, 2004 7:36 AMReally interesting information, and thanks for posting it! I just blogged about this as well as some analysis we did of BoingBoing's stats, at http://www.wingedpig.com/archives/000188.html
Posted by: Mark Fletcher | December 21, 2004 6:02 PMIs your stat in any way trying to measure RSS accessess made by Opera's or Safari's integrated RSS readers?
Posted by: Arve | December 27, 2004 2:07 AMArve, I think Feedburner tracks nearly every RSS Aggregator. It picks up Firefox's Live Bookmarks, which is similar to the two you mentioned.
Posted by: Richard MacManus | December 27, 2004 7:51 PM