We recently covered Only the PC received more coverage in its early days compared to blogs. We also covered the Growth In Blogosphere where we also wrote about, The Pew Internet & American Life study as saying, project Software tools developed in recent years have made blogs easier to create and maintain. Newer technology, known as Really Simple Syndication,or RSS, make it easier to read blogs. RSS software regularly pulls headlines from news sites and Web journals and presents them within e-mail software, Web browsers or standalone programs known as readers. The Pew study found that 5% of online Americans use them. Not for nothing, as we covered Scobeleizer saying, Executives could get fired for not blogging in 2005 .
Now that the use of RSS aggregators is really starting to take off, market share. information about these are being made available. Which aggregator is the favorite among users — and thus best positioned to generate a viable revenue stream? Some data is starting to emerge, though a lot of it would change with passing time and become computed more scientifically. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimated that five percent of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers. That's about six million Internet users, and the number is probably higher because Pew only surveyed adults. FeedBurner, a service that manages feeds for publishers, has now come out with interesting data. They report, looking at the top 800 feeds they manage, that Bloglines users accounted for 32.86 percent of traffic (there are lots of caveats about the accuracy of the data,.NetNewsWire was second). When bloglines "integrates high targeted contextual advertising" service later this year,it would benefit them a lot.Bloglines popularity can be attributed to the fact it is web based and its ability to get at your data from any computer is the differentiator. Also interesting is that two of the top RSS feed readers in the FeedBurner list are for podcasting. Podcasting's growth is a key trend to watch.
Other Key trends to note from the report:
- RSS Client market is not yet consolidating, it's expanding..
- Mobile RSS readers are already growing in popularity
- Of the feeds managed, in aggregate, RSS circulation is growing by about 1% every weekday.
- Total number of feeds under management are increasing at the rate of about 1% every weekday.
- Feedburner currently manages a significant percentage of the world's active podcasts with our SmartCast service. The podcasting phenomenon is accelerating.
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