RSS Reader Market in Disarray, Continues to Decline
One of the interesting trends of 2009 has been the gradual decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news and niche topics. Many of us still use them, but less than we used to. I for one still maintain a Google Reader account, however I don't check it on a daily basis. I check Twitter for news and information multiple times a day, I monitor Twitter lists, and I read a number of blogs across a set of topics of most interest to me.
Frankly I'm more likely to use Google Reader to search for specific information nowadays, than to scan my subscribed feeds for their latest posts. So what's happened to RSS Readers. Do people still use them and is there still a viable market for them?
In February 2007 we reported on the state of the RSS Reader market, based on statistics from Feedburner and Pheedo. At that point Google had 59% market share amongst web-based RSS Readers, followed by Bloglines with 33%, then Newsgator and Netvibes with 3% (note: this didn't count Newsgator's desktop apps, like FeedDemon). Pheedo's stats in February 2007 were somewhat different: Newsgator Online had 27% share, followed by MyYahoo! with 20%, Blogines 19% and Google Reader 13%.
The first time ReadWriteWeb looked into market share for RSS Readers was 5 years ago, in December 2004. At that point, very early in the web 2.0 era, Bloglines was the clear leader and Google Reader wasn't even a glint in the milkman's eye.
2009 Update on RSS Reader Market
Well, unfortunately Feedburner no longer publishes any useful data about RSS Readers. The product has been infrequently updated since Google acquired it in June 2007 and it no longer even has a proper blog (a Google blog called Adsense For Feeds was the closest I could find).
Pheedo also has gone quiet from a blogging perspective - its last blog post was January 2009. Tellingly though, it has an active Twitter account.
The best data we have then is ReadWriteWeb's own Feedburner account. Here is the top 10 for Dec 09:
1. Google Feedfetcher 85665 (includes both Google Reader and its start page iGoogle)
2. Bloglines 38797
3. Netvibes 34894
4. FriendFeed 16269
5. NewsGator Online 6753
6. Firefox Live Bookmarks 2999
7. PostRank 2454
8. Windows RSS Platform 1587
9. Mac OS X RSS Reader 1307
10. Zhuaxia 1127 (a Chinese RSS Reader)
Feedburner's numbers always need to be taken with a large grain of salt, nevertheless we can see that Google is now over twice the number of Bloglines. There's little sign of life on Bloglines' blog either and its Compete.com traffic numbers show a decline since June 2009.
Netvibes, FriendFeed, Newsgator and PostRank are the only other english language competitors showing in our Feedburner numbers. The others are either browser (Firefox) or operating system readers.
Also note that Newsgator shut down its online RSS Reader at the end of July this year.
Conclusion: Google Dominates, RSS Readers Less Relevant
These statistics are by no means the definitive RSS Reader market numbers. They do clearly show two things though:
1) Google now dominates what's left of the RSS Reader market. Bloglines is hanging in there, but it seems like it's given up the fight judging by lack of activity in its blog and traffic dips.
2) RSS reading is a very fragmented experience circa 2009. People can monitor news and information via Twitter, Facebook, start pages like Netvibes, their Firefox bookmarks, their OS, aggregators like Techmeme, and so on.
Tell us in the comments how you currently read your RSS feeds and how often you check them in an RSS Reader - if indeed you still use one...
Update: I should add that our news writers use a variety of RSS Readers daily.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
This ridiculousness about not needing RSS or readers because of Twitter has really got to stop. Twitter is great, but it's only part of the story. Blogs are hugely valuable and the best way to keep up with them is still RSS. Google is such a huge brand name they have been able to take over the RSS reader space and that's just the way it goes. The fact that there are few competitors anymore is testament to the fact that it's probably not a good business strategy to go straight up against Google, especially when their technology is free. With the new advances is realtime RSS we will see the continuation of RSS as a valuable and important technology.
On what basis is this article's headline (and 1st 2 sentences) written? Just because the author doesn't use RSS to read his news doesn't mean there's a decline in the overall market... all the stats that the author cites only talk about a shift in market share between different types of RSS readers. Google Reader is an RSS reader (web) app too you know...
"One of the interesting trends of 2009 has been the gradual decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news and niche topics. Many of us still use them, but less than we used to."
I have no idea where this "trend" came from and how he knows that "many of us still use them, but less." Reminds of the axiom: "Know thy customer for he is not thee..."
Louis, small correction: I never said RSS was in disarray, but the RSS Reader market.
I dont agree with Richard .. Feeds and twitter both are different things .. I still subscribe to feeds to the topics which I like ... and yes I use twitter as well .. jut to keep me upto date .. and to know whatelse is happening and what are the trending topics .. may be a few number of users have declined that doesnt mean that whole lot of ppl has stopped using it .. or they dnt subscribe to the feeds anymore ...
Regards,
Daina Thomas
twitter or facebook? are u joking ????
me wants live rss updates, instant news ...
Using Socialite on mac has made rs useful to me again - single interface for twitter + RSS + facebook with a unified 'unread' stream makes it easy to scroll through all updates.
Good points in this article and yes the RSS reader "market" (which has never been one in my humble opinion) is slowly but surely declining. HOwever, yous eem to be considering Google Reader as a mere RSS Reader when it holds considerably greater potential as a monitoring and intelligence tool enabled by tagging and publication of tag-based RSS feeds.
I still prefer to old fashion way of bookmarking my favourite websites/blogs and going through them click by click, when I am free. And if I need to search for news or info, I thought Google is pretty competent in that aspect. As for breaking news, I have not figure out how to track that using Twitter though.
I still use Google Reader daily but have slightly cut down the number of blogs I subscribe to. Twitter gives me the extra range of news and a bit of serendipity.
I still use Google Reader quite a lot although I quite often use the "mark all as read" feature just scanning off the latest in those content category areas I am interested in at that particular time.
I have been very thorough categorizing my feeds which makes it easy to scan also for specific content areas.
I still use NetNewsWire, daily. And I'm not following the same feeds on Twitter (e.g. RWW). Twitter simply has a different purpose for me: It's less structured and filled with more noise. Nice for conversations, for feedback, useless for efficient information gathering.
Still, for a lot of people Twitter, Facebook etc. are their first feed readers ever. In my opinion they did some kind of a technology jump: using social media's conversational tools for reading and writing. Some (few) will find their way to dedicated feed readers and blogs later on. Most will stick with those multiple purpose tools for (alleged) simplification.
Providers of RSS feeds will have to adopt and offer their feeds on Twitter, Facebook etc. as well as they did (and still) offer eMail newsletters.
I use RSS daily. I read my feeds in Netnewswire on Mac OSX, Liferea when on Linux and sometimes in the built-in browser of my Nokia smartphone. I don't like Google Reader. I actually tend to like Twitter (though it is really hard to have a real conversation there...) but I find ridiculus the 140 char limit (I can send longer SMS on a cell phone since years).
I use Google Reader multiple times per day. Most of us don't have all day to be starring at TweetDeck and catch up on our RSS feeds at specific times.
Twitter does not represent and great competition as the source of most of my daily news. It's only purpose is up to date information on real time events.
thanks to google RSS reader I was using twitter before i got on twitter listening to hashtags and following users discretely before i "followed" them by virtue of adding their rss feeds.
i still find that i can share a trend in twitter from the search rss results with non twitter users, especially twitter sceptics in corporate environments precisely because of the RSS reader.
without pipes, simple pie and google reader my intel gathering abilities, productivity and info absorption capabilities would be seriously hampered.
I'm in Google Reader daily. I've already invested my time in deciding what I want there, I don't need to mess around with Twitter to try to catch what I want out of that stream.
I'm surprised that you didn't mention the growth in Netvibes during that past two years.
I agree with Louis Gray in the comments.
The day i stop using RSS is the same last day i stop using the web.
Tools like Google Reader, Feedly, NewsGator are just dedicated tools for the job of reading RSS. We all consume RSS without knowing that we do - many web apps rely on RSS to talk to each other. So the argument about RSS (or Atom) being dead is redundant and misguided.
The decline in market share for some products, and dedicated readers in general, is more to do with the finite amount of time people have each day to consume inbound content. Media consumption, and production, across the web has evolved, and so dedicated tools focussed on only one task will be favoured less than tools that cover multiple types of media engagement.
I'd just say consuming news has become more fragmented. Our sources are mixed up: twitter, friendfeed, techmeme, rss readers, etc. That has led to decreasing popularity of rss readers.
Posted by: nlupus.myopenid.com
|
December 21, 2009 2:13 AM
I use Google Reader but my heart belongs to Blogbridge.
Well definitely feeds and twitter are two different things but ultimately they are doing the same thing.
I use Google Reader a few times a week. Unlike a lot of people seem too, I use it for nonessential reading -- sites I like to keep up with but don't feel the need to read obsessively. I can scan through on Google Reader, share some finds with my friends and then move on.
I use Bloglines, use it every day, have done for years now. Tried to switch to Google Reader at one point, but failed.
I really don't see how you could use Twitter or Facebook for the same excellent tracking and update service - unless you're using some very different tools, which I guess you are. But for me the feed reader works perfectly and is totally under my control. I think I add one or two feeds a week to my listing and do a purge every few months.
I now have been using online tools for twenty years - I've seen them all come and go. Twitter will fade, Facebook will fade, blogs have faded from the frenzy of a few years ago. But I think infrastructure like feeds and readers will prevail, in the same way the browser will prevail.
Google reader uses google.com/reader, so it is impossible to see its trend chart. Google should use reader.google.com subdomain for reader to make it transparent.
We just launched Collected.info – a service enabling people who normally wouldn't use a RSS reader to keep up with their interests. The service is created to make discovery easy as well.
Check it out on www.collected.info.
Using Twitter to keep up with news. Now, that just sounds like a massive waste of time. I mean, you literally have to search for news instead of lazily browsing through items when using Google Reader. I for one am not using Twitter to keep up with news. It is just waaay to cumbersome. Twitter is only useful when something just has happened. It is always "first on the scene". But I always use Google Reader and my collection of RSS-feeds to keep up with things in the world. It is just so much easier.
I use Google Reader multiple times per day. I subscribe to certain Twitter searches via Google Reader as well.
Although Twitter is great for keeping up with the latest industry news, the ability to read the latest posts within Google Reader makes it a much faster experience for me.
On the iPhone I use Bylines or Reeder to keep up-to-date with RSS feeds, which I tend to do early morning and late evening.
The only reason I saw this article is because it appeared in the TechMeme RSS feed that I read in Google Reader.
I have folders in Google Reader for the blogs that I check every day, new release feeds for software I use (I could never remember to check all 20+ websites regularly), and down at the bottom of the folder list feeds from busy aggregators (like TechMeme) and news sites (like the BBC).
You read multiple blogs by going to their individual web pages? Why? In what way is that preferable to bringing them together in a single RSS reader?
Whenever I've used Twitter all I see is a flood of random soundbites that are mostly meaningless because they're out of any context.
The decline in RSS combined with the increased popularity of services like Twitter, Instapaper or Lazyfeed all lead to the same conclusion: too much information, too little time.
I check rss feeds multiple times a day, by Netvibes
I am an IT journalist
Thanks for this post. I think market saturation for RSS readers has not yet been reached, but perhaps not enough is being done to push the technology?
I use Feedburner to syndicate my blog and have only recently started to use Google Reader to follow news and blogs. I use a WP plugin to integrate my blog posts and extra comments with Twitter, but haven't yet integrated everything in an all-in-one way.
Actually, Keith's post (# 29) very useful and I will be exploring those plugins and apps to see if I can bring the sites I follow on RSS, Twitter, and my own blog posts together in a more coherent way.
Disarray is the wrong word.
The market is stagnating because it is dominated by one product, and that product has the wrong view of RSS.
http://realtimerss.org/post/293254708/google-reader-is-wrong
Dave
I just got on the train and will echo some of the thoughts above; that they have become more useful.
I use feedly on the desktop and NewsRob on the mobile (synced with Google Reader), and I check it about 8 times a day.
Yes I still use Google Reader, although I've never accessed it every day, ever.
It's still highly useful to keep up with posts that I may want to see.
Twitter will continue to evolve and I suspect lists maybe something that I will be able to differentiate the chaff from the good stuff.
If it wasn't for my RSS feed in Google Reader, I wouldn't have read this article. I get all my news the same way.
I use Google Reader daily. I may not be a RSS power user, but RSS is more convenient than visiting a laundry list of websites and their multitude of interfaces and layouts.
Granted, Google Reader Mobile is the worst online product ever, but the full web version allows me to read what I want from one place depending on how much time I have available.
I use My6sense (iPhone app) to aggregate and intelligently sort my RSS feeds by relevance. If you have a Google Reader account already you can import your feeds straight from there.
An added bonus is that you can also use it to read from social streams. This includes Facebook, Friendfeed, Linkedin and Twitter.
My6sense also give you the ability to stream articles you find interesting to Twitter and Facebook. Chances are that if you find it interesting, your social tribe will too.
I've also noticed the decline in my own personal checking of my RSS feeds. The reason for this is because unless I check-in at least daily, they become voluminous and it makes it impossible to catch up unless I mark all as read and go from there. (basically 0 basing)
There are a few discovery tools you can use such as my6sense and fever but those are few and far between.
I still haven't figured out what Twitter is good for. Anything that can be said within the confines of a tweet is probably not worth knowing anyway. I want more substance than a bumper sticker. I want information somebody has taken the time to reflect on, not a slogan off the top of somebody's head. I can't think of much news that I have to know the instant somebody discovers it. Twitter represents the victory of the urgent over the important. Urgent trivia is still trivia. Important takes time and words.
Oh, yeah. I check Google Reader 10-15 times a day.
dave winer must be having a cow - then again, when isn't he? LOL
I find RSS feeds a very useful way to keep up with information flows.
I use Twitter for completely different things.
As news reader I use the Brief plugin for Firefox. Previously I used Sage and Sage-too, but Brief is really the best. Only problem is that Firefox takes long to start up if you follow a lot of RSS-feeds (currently I follow 98 RSS-feeds).
I think RSS never really caught on because when it was released into the community beyond journalists and web professionals it promised something it couldn't deliver: aggregation of complete content.
There are no standards for what a site's RSS feed includes RSS readers were billed as a way to aggregate content from multiple sites in one place saving the end user the trouble of going to those multiple sites but when a feed may include the whole article or simply be a list of titles that you then have to click through to the site to get the full article for, it's not delivering what was promised.
RSS, like every other tool, is only as valuable as the content it provides and if content providers continue to short RSS feeds in favor of pushing people to their web site so they can look at ads, RSS will die the death it deserves.
I write for a tech magazine and i can say the same thing. Yeah, RSS is dead - Twitter brings so much more traffic. As a writer i rely heavily on Google Reader coz that's where i get my information. It's just so much easier to collect all the information in one central place and send it from there to several other services.
I have used Google Reader for the past 4-5 years on a daily basis -- lately with almost 500 feeds in my reader it has become difficult to keep up with the latest trends.
I feel that Twitter helps with this but you still have to follow a lot of people which once again leads to the old info overload thing. Twitter just supplement for me at this stage.
I have purchased Fever a few days ago (http://feedafever.com) in the hope that this will help with discovery. So far it looks promising!
I am also looking at one or two other alternatives to help with making my time reading feeds more productive.
I can not foresee a situation where I will stop reading feeds at all -- my feeds have been curated over the past 4-5 years and are to valuable in my day to day information discovery.
FeedDemon, multiple times per day
My Yahoo, with separate pages for financial, local news for several places, and photography - very attractive and usable interface with other modules alongside RSS. I scan it several times a day.
I actually posted a business idea on my entrepreneur blog about my problems with RSS.
In short order:
1. Duplication of content in several different feeds.
2. Lack of content discovery mechanism.
3. Inflexible content controls.
Shameless plug for the article: http://ideas.biblekin.com/post/283172074/idea-rss-feed-combiner
I love RSS, but some of the problems are really difficult for me to overcome.
Richard,
I think you should also read http://thenextweb.com/2009/12/21/google-reader-wrong/ I think Dave has it right in that RSS Readers aren't evolving to meet user needs, so that is why we have a decline. I know I don't use it as much. Dave talks about Readers being more like News and not Mail which Google Reader feels like.
I think getting a list of top stories to read just based on the sources you read is very important. There is always too much information in my reader I waste my time on. I'm also annoyed seeing the same story from 10 of my sources, it should be grouped together. Then provide me a way to dive deeper on stories I care about.
I have to admit, I am biased because my startup, BuzzBox.com, is doing what I said. We are doing a Minimum Viable Product right now, so it’s only focusing on top technology sources and UI is a work in progress. Would like to get your thoughts on BuzzBox the idea of consuming news this way.
Checkout our video http://www.vimeo.com/8265907 and http://www.buzzbox.com.
Thanks
Anu
Google Reader is one of the most important tools that I use. To me there is a huge difference between this and Twitter - with twitter the 140 character limit is too restrictive to tell whether the link is something i'd be interested in reading or not. Plus I have no visibility into how long the linked article might be. With Google Reader, I read each headline, plus for most articles I can quickly scan the first few paragraphs - without leaving Reader - and see any relevant images to quickly process if I should click the link to read more. I can process over 1,000 articles from dozens of sources in less than an hour - I can't imagine having to try and do that everyday with Twitter.
Google Reader for me too. Use it all the time. Trends tells me "From your 123 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 8,059 items." I wouldn't myself say I "read" all those items but you get the picture.
Google Reader is my "bucket" of news - I hit it twice per day, once in the morning and once in the evening. I'm using it now more than ever.
It ties into my regular flow of information: Consume via RSS, redistribute via Twitter/Posterous/Reader Share, bookmark in Delicious.
It's great to see that everyone has their own way of consuming information, though.
I'll echo what others are saying: I use an rss reader to get all my news. I have a Twitter account and check it for those that don't publish site updates via rss. I use Bloglines as my feed reader--it is inferior to Google Reader, but Google already knows plenty about what I do on the internet. Bloglines has definitely stagnated, despite the "Beta" logo that greets you when you log in. I looked at other online rss readers, but didn't like them. I would switch if I found something better, and have even considered writing a personal site for this purpose.
Previous 1 2 3 4 Next