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.
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I still use my Google Reader account voraciously... not only that, I find that Outlooks integration of RSS into the client is really useful for pulling in RSS from other tools I use like Evernote. Twitter, Netvibes, and Digg are all great resources, but with an RSS feed, you have much more control and customization ... and reading it on a mobile device is very clean. Google Readers' "Popular Items" and "Suggested" are always expanding my list, if you use stats properly, you can drop off sources that you don't read. I think that RSS is here to stay, and I think that its more powerful for the power reader and information gatherer than just Twitter firehose.
Richard is asking the right questions, but some people are confusing RSS (the transport/publish method) with RSS Readers (the human readable method). And to add to the confusion, Twitter is a both a reader, a publishing platform and has an RSS out.
The problem with RSS Readers is they don't offer a very compelling user experience (although Google Reader is trying hard to work on that, as well as Feedly who does a super job at the user experience). And there are major additional problems with RSS readers:
1- Feed management is very time-consuming to manage, especially when you're into the hundreds of feeds.
2- They have very poor filtering and curation capabilities (although GR has social filtering now).
3- They have even more mediocre ways to search or archive.
4- You cannot re-publish / social share (except for GR & Feedly)
That said, the future of RSS is still bright because it's becoming part of the plumbing everywhere. What matters is 'what you do with RSS' from a processing point of view, not just as a collection exercise.
Will one day Twitter-published content totally usurp RSS-published content is a difficult question to answer, although we are seeing publishing platforms directly push content to Twitter while bypassing RSS, e.g. WordPress recently.
What's replacing RSS Readers today is 1) Twitter to some extent, 2) topic-centered applications where content is streamed and/or curated along a variety of ready-made topics for ready-made and management-free user consumption.
To see a good example of #2, here's one on "The Future of RSS" http://bit.ly/7F8rkk , where you can consume daily news on that topic, search an archive of 2,000 related articles and social share,- all done via RSS processing, but without letting the user lift a finger on RSS.
I reached this article via Techmeme's RSS feed. How could people give up on news feeds?? I don't get it.
Posted by: monotonous.org
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December 21, 2009 9:21 AM
Google Reader about once or twice a day with Newsie iPhone app
I love NetNewsWire (in it now) and FeedDemon (when I'm on my PC). Both synch with Google Reader. I use NewsRob on my Android 2.0 mobile device; though it's not nearly as elegant/useful as NNW for the iPhone, it does the trick on droid. I spend about 90 minutes a day using an RSS reader. I work for NewsGator, but would continue to keep my behaviour even if I were working elsewhere.
I've experienced something completely different...over the past two and a half years or so I've actually increased usage of Google Reader. It's the first thing I check besides email, and my subscription list is always increasing
Feedly plus Google Reader is about the best there is - way more useful than twitter could possibly be
I use iGoogle to put the RSS feeds for blogs onto one of the tabs and check it about once a day on average.
I use Viigo daily on my blackberry. It syncs with my Google Reader account, which is where I add/remove feeds. It's one of the most popular apps on the BB, so I'm surprised it does not show up in your list. Perhaps it's flying a little under the radar due to the Google Reader link?
Feedly has brought me back to the RSS reader.
RSS readers are just getting started. Tools like My6sense are about harvesting the right data not aggregating the lot. RSS readers have missed out on the huge opportunity of mining explicit data to infer the intent and interests of there users. My6sense is as far as I know the pioneer in this, they use my usage data to rank the stream and bring only the best stuff (for me) to the top. This makes the ability to scan large sets of data quick and convenient.
Google is starting to do this with search results, as inference engines and matching algorithms mature further it will become common place very quickly. "RSS readers" will become far more valuable to the crowd and will be everywhere and in everything.
I convert the rss feed from my web site www.contractjob.net via twitterfeed to automatically output tweets via twitter.
I see this as the new way to market a web site and since google is interested in realtimeweb to increase my future realtimeweb page ranking (which it won't be called then).
As these posts will include 'time' info I guess the future google ranking system may like my site in the brave new world of 'time based posting'.
So RSS may be useful after all.
I used to try and keep up with lots of RSS Feeds (using Bloglines, GoogleReader, etc) but I have more or less given that up. Now I just subscribe to a much smaller number of feeds using http://www.feedmyinbox.com which is such a wonderfully simple web application that sends any feed to any supplied email address once a day.
...Having just submitted the previous comment, I now discover http://www.feedmyinbox.com is going to start charging for five or more feeds from 9 January 2010. So, I guess I'll be forced to cut down even more... And I feel that because of the charging I now cannot recommend the service.
The scope of the discussion triggered by this topic underscores the range of issues involved in the RSS debate. Consumer RSS consumption, publisher behavior, underlying integration/backoffice protocol.....
The rapid growth in "subscribable information" ("followable" in the case of Twitter) and options for users to consume it are very positive overall. The popularity of any particular tool will fluctuate and the best approach will depend on the objective of the user. What Twitter has demonstrated is that subscribing and the experience of consuming subscription based information can be very simple and powerful. I would argue that we are in the early stages of sorting out how our personal and business lives are impacted by a world of networked and frequently changing information. The success of Twitter is very important in the this process and as each of you have suggested it should be embraced as opportunity for "RSS" readers.
I do not necessarily see these trends sustaining the either/or view of how information is consumed. For example, I can "subscribe" to any of 70 RSS feeds or "follow" 13 or so Twitter accounts on Forbes.com. You can follow Attensa on twitter or you can subscribe to http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/12375152.rss with an RSS tool. Perhaps someone will argue there is more "Real timeness" in the Twitter stream but add in PubSubHubBub or RSS Cloud and that distinction goes away. And then of course there is the whole debate over centralized or distributed..... and which is better for the web in general.
This is all good. Twitter has once again driven home the virtues of simplicity. But as I write this there are organizations working to overcome limitations to the utility of Twitter that result from its simplicity.
As things evolve along the "browse" > "search" > "subscribe/follow" use model the tools we embrace change, become, obsolete and hopefully contribute to future innovation. The promise of these tools to simplify our information lives personally and professionally is huge but different approaches are required for different environments. For example, in the business context where information awareness means, innovation, execution and dollars the ability to quickly connect and subscribe to information has enormous utility that is just beginning to be explored and resized. While the notion of "subscribe" and the concept of "activity stream" have great value and form the basis for real business solutions - security policies, manageability and other factors require different tools. It is an interesting journey.
I use Google Reader daily. Like most commenters on here, using Twitter for real-time news is great, but beyond that "fast food" mentality, I use Google Reader to make sure I keep up to date on specific thought leaders in a variety of industries, all of whom have RSS feeds.
Stop worrying about how many people use RSS readers, and start focusing on who the people using RSS readers ARE.
I use Bloglines, and it's a time-saver: instead of checking 50+ blogs, comics, and infrequent posters, they all come to me instead of the other way around. Of course, I doubt the "average" reader keeps up with even five sites at any given time, let alone 50 -- i.e. the ones who are using readers were already in need of them because they're following more sites than they can handle, and the ones who aren't don't realize they want them (so they can follow even MORE stuff).
Once you recognize that the primary folks using RSS readers are the hardcore audiences to begin with, things get easier. There's no reason for a site to stop posting an RSS feed, after all -- and an RSS reader is just one way of using and abusing the feed.
RSS readers have to evolve because the content generation and social interaction that supports them is evolving. Being "receive only" is missing the full potential of the social web.
Our "reader" is actually a 2-way system that lets you stream feeds and also create public or private content around those feeds. Check out Tick-it at www.balaya.com With Tick-it, you can make a feed a member of your group and debate, argue, endorse the feed content as the group wishes. Put RM's twitter feed (using RSS) into your tech group and have at it. And the tool can be used as a desktop app (in adobe air).
As content and content generation apps multiply, there will be an expanding market for tools that elegantly aggregate and simplify. RSS is a sound conduit for making that possible.
Well, frankly I've never used Google Reeader. I tried to set it up with a few feeds once and it didn't feel right, I didn't feel it was saving my time...
What I "do" do is going straight to blogs by typing their addresses. Twitter, everyday! Links in Twitter (mainly re-tweeted tweets), open 'em all!
Well.. my point of view
I still check google reader as frequently as possible. To keep from overflowing with information, I make a point to check every Sunday and comb through as much as possible then. Though recently, feedly has changed my habits and I'm starting to use it a lot more than Google Reader. Feedly provides an incredible experience, and makes RSS even MORE seamless. If that's even possible.
I've never been able to stick with the habit of checking in on an RSS reader, so I love the fact that many blogs now tweet about new posts. I find it a much more efficient way to keep up with the many kinds of information I like to track.
I used Google Reader or Newsgator, but now Twitter provides me with news. Since Twitter can be overwhelming sometimes, I use the second account for following news.
I've also posted a guide, how can you make your Twitter into a RSS Reader. It's on my blog http://matjazsircelj.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/how-to-use-twitter-as-a-rss-reader/.
Ugh, all signs are pointing so something in the realm of RSS but I don't think anyone really knows what it is yet...
It could be that all our real time knowledge needs will be satisfied by the stream and the real time web, or it could be that rss readers in total are seeing less attention. The total number of internet users of RSS readers would be an interesting stat to see and how those correlate to what the top blogs are in general...
Besides that I think for certain that we all won't be using readers like Google Reader is as of now the same way in a few years time, maybe we'll develop better systems or different habits, sort of in the same vane that the OLPC itself was not a huge success but lead the road to the massively popular Netbook revolution. RSS could be poised for a similar revival.
When you take a look at services like Facebook, Posterous, and Tumblr, what's the point of having tools like Google Reader when each service builds a big part of it's social foundation on the action of subscription to news streams? In any case this blog post though informative can only really paint one angle of what's happening in the greater subcription/rss trend.
RSS irrelevant? Someone is smok'n something! Twitter to get your news? Someone is been drinking too much twitter coolade! There is NO BETTER way to get your news than RSS! Get real! LOL!
I found myself overwhelmed with the sheer number of RSS feeds brought through my Safari feed reader and began to check it less because I couldn't face sorting through it all. Sometimes I suspect that articles are written to be short and limited in scope so as to supply the feed with many more stories.
So I switched to Firefox and feedly which integrates with both GoogleReader and Twitter. Feedly offers various formats which are much easier to read and scan, categorizing by topic and can be customized to emphasize whatever one wants it to. It also can have a short Twitter feed along the side to offer another avenue of topic interaction, and a very easy tweet or other share options feature.
I use Twitter to see what other interesting people think is important enough to tweet - it's a trend spotting device at its best. I sorted some of my favorite writers that just tweet too much for my taste into rss feeds where I can scan the titles and first lines, and left the less frequent tweeters on Twitter where the randomness and serendipity of interesting posts is a delight to discover. It's all in who you follow, and the tweeters your posts attract.
Perhaps rss is not so much in disarray as it is in evolution as users use it and change it to suit their needs and writers/posters learn how readers differentiate between and use both Twitter and rss feeds. I imagine by the time rss is mainstream it will have changed form radically.
Like many categories, the RSS readers is doomed to become a "feature" of a great offering. I am an ex-Blogines user who now reads my feeds through a combination of Microsoft Outlook (great for offline/airplane acess), MyYahoo (on my home machines)and iGoogle (my work homepage for top items).
So it makes perfect sense to me that standalone RSS readers will disappear at a category.
I still use my reader every day. Best way I've found to keep up with sites and feeds.
Coincidentally I wrote an article about Google Reader just yesterday. My assertion is that it is a key tool for a structured approach to gathering information.
The process of reviewing information from many sources in one single location, with article preview, delayed reading, tagging, saving, sharing and republishing is not yet matched in the twitter universe.
Twitter publishes RSS-feeds for searches, which is how I mash tweets and RSS based news in Reader. Tweetmeme publishes RSS-feeds for searches in its channels. It should be an easy feature to add for the real-time search engines, but it may be hard to find the economic motivation for them.
But the team at Google Reader should be able to add support for the Twitter API, so the user can treat tweets as just another news source that can be subscribed to. Imagine that, the tweets and previews of the articles they link to, all in one place.
Google, are you listening?
I use Google Reader still, but I don't check it everyday like I used too. Between digg, reddit, twitter and the top sites page in Safari most of reading needs are met. My RSS reader is like a Sunday paper for me, something I like relax and spend some time with.
Killer feature of RSS readers is you can track what you already read versus what are the unread items.
Google Reader has the best mobile experience for rich browsers in smartphones. For the average person, most feedreading will rather happen in mobile context.
Just because of lack of the read-unread tracking feature, most Twitter clients are a pain.
OTOH, the anti-killer feature of Twitter clients is the massive redundancy.
What the world needs is the four-way marriage of Google Reader, PostRank, My6Sense, and Readtwit.
I have to admit that I always find these "the death of RSS is near" articles odd.
Twitter is not a bad source for breaking news. But it's probably "too" breaking. 140 characters and some of that lost to a shortened URL does not do much to entice me to read things.
I find the digerati get more obsessive about the instantaneous"ness" of Twitter than many others. This may shock some, but not everything is all the interesting or important the moment it happens. Worse yet, I frequently don't care who got out the news first. Websites freak out because the early eyes that visit their webpage mean money to them. I understand this. But it doesn't influence me. Most early news stories are garbage. "Tiger Woods crashes his SUV outside him home". Ok. Not huge. But one week later and the full story comes out... now that's a bigger story.
Me? I check my Google Reader account several times a day. I check my twitter account once every several DAYS. I think the bigger issue is the lack of relevant stats on RSS feeds and the lack of new development. But RSS is sure to stay for quite some time. I'm not wasting my time checking all these sites. I would not have looked at this article were it not for my Techmeme feed on Google Reader account. It's that simple.
How can "Twitter for news and information multiple times a day", monitoring Twitter lists, and reading a number of blogs can be more efficient than using an RSS reader???
My feeds are all on Google reader but their interface just sucks. There is a solution to that though: Feedly (http://www.feedly.com/ )
I use Google Reader multiple times a day, mostly on my phone. This is the most efficient way I know to keep up with multiple blogs. In addition, sending Google Alerts to GReader is very helpful to keep with topics/companies one is interested in.
@Mark de Visser: Check out http://twiterlist2rss.appspot.com/. It lets you convert a twitter list into an RSS feed. I read my BreakingNewsOnline feed on GReader.
Ugh.. Too much information to process. Our human minds overload at the sheer amount of it and then in the end we realise we didn't really care anyway. Mind you I did get to this story via Google Reader but I think the RSS Reader applications are dead in the water. Cloud is the way if ever there was a way; despite the declination of use.
Very interesting, the game changes again... or it is re-defined... thank you
RSS not in decline for me, either.
I continue to use Netvibes when I need to catch up with published articles, blogs etc. To save me going round different sites. The ordering of articles on tabs (topics) and by site (source) is handy. And there are lots of options on how to format and lay out your material as you like.
Twitter is rapid reaction but a constant stream that can wash important things by you unnoticed.
I use Google Reader. I've never used another RSS reader. I either don't use or don't know how to use the other methods you mentioned. Firefox bookmarks?! And there are plenty of people I find myself explaining how Google Reader works to.
I'm using Google Reader and have for approx. 2 years. It still feels like the quickest way to scan your favorites in an organized way.
Twitter has its place by creating search columns in TweetDeck or Seesmic on various words/phrases you're interested in tracking. You can also create column of your twitter lists which is extremely useful.
I'm using Google Reader's "Note in Reader" bookmarklet regularly.
My two 25+ year old daughters don't use RSS at all, they use facebook and jump around from site to site for their news.
Just like in 2007 you almost need to include a link on your blog, assuming you're a blogger that says, "What is RSS?" People still don't know what the hell it is for the most part.
While twitter may proove useful sometimes for good breaking news. Cluttered, irrelevant, mundane tweets as well as spam is a constant hurdle in the stream.
RSS has many merits, even if numbers show a declining usage.It musnt undermine the fact that its a great way of being updated with quality carefully written content on the internet. No wonder every twitter page has an RSS icon as well.
As to the problem of being 'real time' feed readers such as netvibes have tried to solve it with instant updates via RSS with better tools. Similar work has been done by Google and Wordpress in this regard.
RSS is ubiquitous so are twitter and facebook. I doubt RSS would be dead instead a integral part of a new media mix developing on how we consume and publish content.
Twitter+Facebook+Blogs+ RSS + Newsreaders+ Live Streaming+p2p among many more. The future is just beginning =]
i use greader multiple times a day for most of my web 'browsing' !
I agree with most of the comments posted on the topic, but offer a word of caution. When a project of this magnitude and I mean the RSS feed concept has reached 42 million websites form 3 million 4 years ago, I say the concept is growing no doubt.
Now for the readers themselves, there are two downsides, #1 is the "pay for acquiring the reader and renew every year", It sucks as words of economy downturn will trigger a drop in subscription. #2 Even Google who has bought Feedburner and is pushing their free browser RSS reader has to come with these terms " they need the browser open to see their feed".
I think that an RSS feed reader has to be totally free on the desktop, with minimal real estate and trigger alerts on feed changes, that does not take a rocket science major to operate, the only one that fits this description is Twittsplorer, I got it an I like it.
Cheers to all
SP
I was late to the party and only starting really using an RSS reader this year, and I LOVE it. I use NetNewsWire. To me, it's the deeper, richer version of what I pick up from twitter. Maybe it's just a utility to people now so it's not sexy and "new."
I tend to check Google Reader multiple times a day. While I do keep up with bigger news through Friendfeed or Twitter. I like to keep up with multiple Graphic Design blogs, tech blogs, entertainment blogs, photography blogs and Apple blogs on my own. I just can't see myself ditching RSS Readers for something that I really don't have much control over.
Use GReader all the time. Plus, it's useful for following the RSS feeds of Twitter updates - for all the realtimeshifted stalkers out there. ;)
If people use RSS aggregation tools less too, then this is good news for bloggers.
I use the Opera Web Browser RSS tool and Google Reader.
Arrgh. I was confronted with the collapse of RSS readers when NewsGator shut down out from under me in August. That one was by far my favorite, but even it seemed to be just a rough first pass compared to what this class of tool should evolve into.
I revisited some of the previous readers I have used -- Google (hate it), Bloglines (derelict) -- tried out a few new ones, and found a lot of shut-down carcasses. I finally settled on FeedDemon because it has the best UI (similar to NewsGator), but I really would rather have something web-based.
I would think the core mission of a reader is to bring feed items to you, in order, in the most convenient possible way. Most readers had trouble with even this. Beyond that, I can see some possibilities for guidance in sipping from the fire hose that is the internet, but I really want control over those parameters -- I don't want to be led around, sheep-like, to whatever is in the interest of a gate keeper. Where is this tool going to come from if RSS readers go extinct?
I think RSS feeds are misunderstood. You don't read the. You search them. By aggregating a lot of personally selected feeds, you are searching a defined universe of high quality information and blocking the usual junk that populated web-based search results.
RSS feeds are still indispensable for me, but I am a very heavy news reader, particularly the major sources like WSJ, NYT, and The Economist. I prefer NetNewsWire over the online feeders though. It syncs with my Google Reader, but I find the inteface much more user friendly.
What you'll probably see is news aggregators being used mainly by heavy readers, and more dispersed sources for people who just casually follow blogs and such.
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