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.
Yeah, if I have to respond to “what is Gmail?”, I’m not even going to touch on “what is RSS?” – make it easy, not geeky, and it works 🙂
Hey there,
Great blog.
Long time listener, first time caller 😉
I think even the way that getting a handle on “subscriber” stats is a bit of a black art.
Certainly, the way that Feedburner describes it makes it sound like they use some sort of proprietary formula — err, algorithm, perhaps — that takes into account a number of factors. Because its proprietary no one knows how they crunch those factors and how they weigh them differently.
To wit:
Subscribers is inferred from an analysis of the many different feed readers and aggregators that retrieve this feed daily. Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed. Subscribers is calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations, and then using our detailed understanding of the multitude of readers and aggregators and bots on the market to make additional inferences.
Regardless, the % of people using RSS feeds is, I think astonishingly low for how useful a tool they are; perhaps with the full release of MSIE7 there will be better penetration for it.
Cheers
Tony
I know what RSS is… and I’m a minor.
Figures.