Dead 2.0 has the stats, only 9% of Americans know what RSS is. Only 2% subscribe to a feed. I’d suggest though the actual subscription rate would be higher, it would be similar to the blog conundrum: that in the same way people read blogs without knowing they are reading blogs, I’d reckon that people are subscribing to sites without knowing they are using RSS.
Interesting also is what people are using to read the RSS they don’t know they are reading that are. As announced here, b5media now has feedburner stats. We’ve never had this sort of service before, and after a few days we’re finally getting some juicy stats.
What’s really interesting is what people are using: feed readers that don’t necessarily need a RSS feed to subscribe to (or more correctly via): classic example, early stats show Google Desktop and MyYahoo! in the top 4. What’s really interesting though is once you strip away our tech blogs it changes again: Firefox Live Bookmarks and Google Desktop come out in front. Compare to our tech blogs alone: Newsgator comes in a 3, myYahoo doesn’t get a look in.
I’m going to spend some more time looking at these stats, but all in all it’s fascinating to see the differences across different demographics…but it’s also important to remember that the kiddies reading celebrity blogs aren’t going to likely be as tech savy as, for example, the readers of a tech blog. KISS + give them easy ways of subscribing. That’ll do the trick.
